Fishery managers ponder payment for smallmouth bass

By Scott Sandsberry | Yakima Herald-Republic • Published January 06, 2009

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Like all trophy-hunting sportsmen, smallmouth bass anglers want to keep the big ones.

Fishery managers are trying to convince them to keep the smaller ones.

So much so, in fact, they’re considering paying them for it — for the very reason, and possibly, in much the same way, that for the last decade they have paid anglers a bounty to catch and keep northern pikeminnow. Like the pikeminnow, the smallmouth bass feast upon enough chinook salmon smolts to affect salmon runs.

“(A bounty program) works for the pikeminnow. The studies say that’s helping,” said Anthony Fritts, an Ellensburg-based state fisheries biologist who has researched salmonid predation in the Yakima River by smallmouth bass.

The pikeminnow bounty, though, targets the larger pikeminnows, since they’re the ones feeding on salmon smolts. Any smallmouth bass program would almost certainly target the younger, smaller ones that do the most damage to the smolt population.

But neither Fritts nor state Fish and Wildlife Department regional fish program manager John Easterbrooks thinks a bounty program is the way to go.

“My unofficial opinion?” Fritts said, “I don’t know if it would really work. There’s too many bass. There’s so many bass, and — I can really only talk about the Yakima (River) — they come out of the Columbia River in the spring.

“So even if you did some kind of bounty in the Yakima, I have a hard time believing you could make a difference. You’d just get more fish coming in out of the Columbia.”

Easterbrooks said many fisheries biologists would rather see a removal of all bag limits on bass than the institution of a bounty, but isn’t sure there’s an answer either way.

“I can understand that (interest in removing all bag limits), but it really isn’t probably effective as far as reducing predation on salmonids,” he said. “Even if you took off the all the regulations and just had open season on bass, barring a bounty, fishermen aren’t going to catch and keep enough bass to really put a dent in the population.”