Do you not fish at all from end up February into June?......not being a smartarse just thinking if you fish at all during that timeframe then you will be fishing the spawn if you are on the water.

I wouldn't trust either one.

I think they are playing with words here. "Bed fishing does not significant impact the number of fish entering the next generation." It's much more complicated than that in my opinion.

Bass obviously produce far more eggs and fry than any system could possibly support. Say a system can only support 1,000 new bass per generation. The adult bass in the system may produce millions of eggs, but only 1,000 are going to survive to make it into the next generation of adults. The rest will either be eaten or starve. So you could remove a bunch of nests without really impacting the number of fish that make it into the next generation.

However, what will suffer is the optimal biomass carrying capacity of the system. The more mature that biomass gets before it's removed from the system, the more forage the entire system has. That is to say that a fry as forage is more helpful to the system than an egg. A 2 month old fish is more helpful to the system than a fry. It's just more consumable biomass.

When you pull fish off beds their nests are getting raided or the eggs are otherwise dying, thus you are pulling out consumable biomass before the system has reached it's optimal carrying capacity. In that sense I don't see how removing fish from a bed could not be harmful to the optimization of a system as a whole.

There is nuance here as well.

Catch a fish off a bed and immediately return it? Probably not much harm done the system.
Have 10 anglers in a row lined up to catch that same fish and immediately return it. Probably more harm done.
Catch a fish off a bed and leave it in a live well for 8 hours before transporting it 7 miles. Even more harm done.
Catch a fish off a bed and release it into grease. Most harm done.

Along that line of thought, is it also possible that the potential biomass of bass fry lost to nest raiders eventually contributes to higher survival and spawning success of the bluegills or minnows that raided the nest, for example? The biomass/energy is not lost so much as it is funneled through another line of the food chain. Dead eggs left to decompose are releasing nutrients that could contribute to vegetation or plankton growth which goes right back into one food chain or another. Not really in disagreement here, just brainstorming. There's always a point where an impact starts having legitimate negative effects.

I know what you are saying OD. there is so much that is defined by balance in an aquatic environment its almost impossible to simplify it down to words. way too many different levels of data to consider for most.

I can't tell you the number of bass I've caught from beds to release them and have them go straight back to the bed. Some I've caught numerous times and the same thing happens. If your wife gets pregnant and you take her out of your home and move her across the country...is she any less pregnant? These fish still spawn, even if you move them. Likely they'll push a smaller female off a nest to take it over...but they will still spawn. In Canada they have an actual bass season (at least in Ontario) and don't let you target bass during the spawn. Colder weather and limited grass/cover during the spawn there play a big part. Needless to say, Florida and Texas have no problem with either.

if conditions are consistent, you can find the same fish spawning in the same place as the year or years prior.

In the Summer, In the Fall, In the Winter, In the Spring. You are always interrupting a naturally occurring process...

So all anyone has to do is sight a lake where they think bed fishing has hurt the population. Don't use Rayburn or Toledo if you want to make a case.

THIS is on point.
I have heard the same argument from deer hunters about shooting does.
" I won't shoot a doe after the rut because it may be bred" is the equivalent argument to catching bed fish. For deer, this is the dumbest argument ever. It doesn't matter when you shoot a doe because she will NEVER breed again - you took her out of the herd.

I think that most people refuse to take into consideration that the fish they are looking at are a SMALL % of the fish on beds. There are a ton of bed fish that are in deeper water that anglers never see.

common sense also tells us that bed fishing like tournaments does not harm the fishery because both have been going on for 40 plus years at our lakes and fishing in most lakes is as good or better than it was 40 years ago....
if you want to be concerned about something harmful to our lakes,raise hell with your fishery biologists about cormorants and spraying grass....

Lol, this^^^^





Here's a good read from 08

https://www.bassmaster.com/news/ethics-bed-fishing

Not any lakes that I fish. They seemed much better in the past. The other side is you never know what those lakes would have become without those two things because they were never allowed to be. Also why raise hell a out commorants and spraying if the lakes are better than the past because that would show that they dont harm it either. I don't think they are ad good as the party but I think it is more odd the numbers of fishermen now compared to then

Glean Lau's observations in FL don't seem to match