Science aids sport of ‘fish stories’

Researchers at a New York university say they have proof that by following the tradition of keeping the biggest fish of the day and throwing back the little guys, fishermen may actually be doing a disservice to their favorite sport.

According to a study published in the journal Science, a four-generation laboratory study of fish determined that releasing the bigger fish instead allows the species to eventually double in size and number. When only big fish are harvested, in other words, the smaller ones that are left to reproduce will spawn smaller and smaller fish over the generations.

If this theory of “evolutionary dynamics” is correct, then putting back the best catch of the day would seem to be the most sensible method of enhancing the game-fish population that sportsmen depend on for their recreation. But I can’t help thinking that it would also produce an undesirable side effect that the researchers did not factor into their study.

The way I see it, it would make us fishermen into bigger liars than we already are.

As it stands now, a fisherman who comes home with a couple of puny 8-inch trout has no choice but to be honest about his luck, or lack thereof. He is, after all, holding the unimpeachable evidence of his less-than-stellar angling exploits. But if the bag-limit rules were to change in midstream, as it were, that same fisherman might be tempted to tell anyone who would listen that he did, of course, catch much bigger fish that day – a couple of real beauties, actually, including one that had to be close to 3 pounds. The fisherman would then shrug and say that he had no choice – good conservationist and unselfish sportsman that he is – but to throw those big ones back and settle for the smaller ones.

Having spent some 30 pleasurable years in the company of anglers, I can honestly say that most fishermen do not need any more opportunities to lie than exist already. Their reputation as the biggest liars of the sporting world is so well-established, so legendary, in fact, that the term “fish story” has become a catch-all for every sort of prevarication and exaggeration.

Some fishermen lie just a little, and some lie a lot. And if you meet a fisherman who swears he’s never once in his life stretched the truth about the size of his catch or the number, there’s a pretty good chance he’s lying.

A fisherman who has not caught a fish all day will invariably have “missed a couple of nice ones,” however, which may or may not be the truth but nonetheless serves to justify all the hours he has just spent standing waist-deep in a river and waving an expensive fly rod in the air. He may have had “a good one on” just moments before you showed up at the river, in fact. But as bad luck would have it, the lunker “snapped the leader” after a mighty run or two. In angling terminology, these very large and powerful fish fall into the convenient category of “the ones that got away,” even if they were never hooked to begin with.

And if a fisherman does tell you he got “skunked” completely, an uncommon admission in the streamside fraternity, it may be that he’s lying through his teeth in order to keep his most productive fishing waters a secret.

The other day, I met a fisherman who would put the rest of us more modest liars to shame. We had been fishing not far apart from each another for nearly two hours, and in all that time neither of us had gotten a trout to even come up and look at our flies. Eventually, we both gave up and headed back to our cars. As we were packing up, the fisherman’s buddy strolled up and asked him if he’d had any luck on the river.

“Not much,” I overheard the liar say without hesitation. “Just a couple of small brown trout, no more than 12 inches or so.”

As I drove away, I laughed to think how much bigger those two mythical trout were going to grow by the time the guy got around to telling his fish story at home.