Selective recreational Pacific salmon fisheries that require catch-and-release are used to protect specific species or populations, while allowing continued access to angling. Catch-and-release angling assumes that a large proportion of released fish will survive. We captured coho salmon using common recreational rod-and-reel techniques and held the fish in a field laboratory for a minimum of 10 days to examine the survival consequences of release. We examined the impacts of “fish friendly” mesh landing nets and tandem hook configurations. The mesh landing nets resulted in a greater hazard of mortality, while there was no mortality trend observed for the hook configuration treatment. Injuries caused by the angling treatments were greater for fish landed with a mesh landing net (relative to a vinyl-coated sling) and fish landed with tandem hook configurations (relative to single-hook configurations). Injuries to the dermal surface (i.e. scale loss and fin damage) of fish drove high mortality (38% for most damage), while fish without any dermal injuries had only 4% mortality. Coho salmon that were more mature had increased survival through the experiments. This study demonstrates that if coho salmon are handled minimally, and recreational fisheries are focused near the terminus of coho salmon marine migrations, high post-release survival may be achievable.
Johnston et al. (Tue,) studied this question.