The physiological consequences of catch‐and‐release angling: perspectives on experimental design, interpretation, extrapolation and relevance to stakeholders
By S. Cooke, M. Donaldson, C. O’Connor, G. Raby, Robert Arlinghaus, A. Danylchuk, K. Hanson, S. Hinch, Timothy D. Clark, D. Patterson and 1 more. 2013
197 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Over the past 20 years, there has been a dramatic increase in the use of physiological tools and experimental approaches for the study of the biological consequences of catch-and-release angling practices for fishes. Beyond simply documenting problems, physiological data are also being used to test and refine different strategies for handling fish such that stress is minimised and survival probability maximised, and in some cases, even for assessing and facilitating recovery post-release. The inherent sensitivity of physiological processes means that nearly every study conducted has found some level of – unavoidable – physiological disturbance arising from recreational capture and subsequent release. An underlying tenet of catch-and-release studies that incorporate physiological tools is that a link exists between physiological status and fitness. In reality, finding such relationships has been elusive, with further extensions of individual-level impacts to fish populations even more dubious. A focus of this article is to describe some of the challenges related to experimental design and interpretation that arise when using physiological tools for the study of the biological consequences of catch-and-release angling. Means of overcoming these challenges and the extrapolation of physiological data from individuals to the population level are discussed. The argument is presented that even if it is difficult to demonstrate strong links to mortality or other fitness measures, let alone population-level impacts of catch-and-release, there remains merit in using physiological tools as objective indicators of fish welfare, which is an increasing concern in recreational fisheries. The overarching objective of this paper is to provide a balanced critique of the use of physiological approaches in catch-and-release science and of their role in providing meaningful information for anglers and managers.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f94caf31bfd2d51ef32a1325d51025d62e42946a
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
In Global and Planetary Change
In Nature and Landscape Conservation
Citations in the corpus
- Looking beyond the mortality of bycatch: sublethal effects of incidental capture on marine animals (2014, unknown): “In recreational fisheries, the failure to demonstrably link capture stress with sublethal fitness measures has been a persistent challenge to translating research into management action (Cooke et al., 2013).”
- FISH Out of WATER: How Much Air is Too Much? (2015, background): “Educating fishers about the requirements of their focal species is an important component of ensuring compliance or simply instilling conservation-oriented behaviors (Cooke et al. 2013).”