Biologists Fear Bass Tournaments Reducing Texas Fish Populations
There are bass tournaments somewhere in Texas on practically any
given weekend, and some wildlife biologists worry about what
this mass non-stop fishing is doing to the fish populations. As
you might expect, there’s disagreement. Studies of the impact of
bass tournaments have found that, despite catch-and-release
rules, a lot of fish are still killed needlessly, and this can
do major harm to a lake’s bass population. Texas Parks and
Wildlife Department biologists say tournaments have already
reduced the bass population in at least one lake in north Texas
— Amon Carter Lake, an 1,800-acre reservoir east of Wichita
Falls. After complaints from local fishermen, TPWD biologists
set out to tag a certain number of fish and wait for reports of
those fish being caught by tournament fishermen. The problem was
immediately apparent, when the biologists had a hard time
catching 800 fish to tag. They kept catching fish that had
already been tagged. They say