yes bigmouth buffaloes and white suckers. Problem with buffaloes is their fastest growth rate in juveniles that they will be too big for most predatory fishes by their first summer.
Gar bow hunting
- Thread starter raymondk394
- Start date
that was my next question haha, I wanted to know if you had an overfished predator offsetting the balance.
theres only a good steady population of longnose down towards were dive lives, I don't have ANY up here. there may be a few scattered loners in the lakes but I've never seen or heard of anyone catching them.
Good numbers of catfish, bass and walleyes, but they cannot keep up with the carps/buffaloes fast growth and that's why there is always overpopulation of them.
Me personally have no care for the common carps and grass carps they shoot because they destroy our native populations and they are invasive the more the better but I hate seeing the huge giant alligator gars being killed I feel like the big guys should be respected and let be our cuaght off rod and reel them released some of these gar are as old as me and people kill them just for the sport of it seems very barbaric and cruel and believe me when I say they do not die right away they have to put three or four arrows before they start dying
I think being thrown in a cooler full of ice or in the bucket full of dissolved oxygenated water sounds barbaric to me as you can suffered for hours than being bleed out in few minutes.
I don't really have a problem with any form of legal harvest, provided you stay within established legal and ethical limits. If you live in a state that allows the legal take of a specific fish, i.e. Gar fish, what difference does it make if the fish was shot with a bow, or brought in by hook and line and killed and cooked? That said, we have an issue with bowfishing in my home state that I do think is a problem. In Louisiana, you can catch and keep gar fish of any size with hook and line, or by bow fishing. They are very plentiful here, and aren't a popular enough sport fish for angling pressure (line or bow) to really impact the population. However Louisiana also allows bow fishing for a number of species that have protected size limits, like redfish. This makes no sense to me. Here in La, you can keep 5 redfish over 16 inches but only 1 over 27. When bowfishing, there are going to be under sized and oversized fish shot (more likely over sized) but live/healthy release isn't an option so they end up wasted. I see plenty of them in the marsh when I am fishing. This to me is sheer stupidity.
I don't know if you guys have the same problems as we do here, but there's a lot of aquarists that have released a TON of pleco's everywhere here. I aim to kill them where I know they shouldn't be in the first place. Even as a little kid 20 years ago I was seeing them and hand catching them in the springs (releasing of course). This is fine because while they can travel down stream, they generally don't with the food source changes, and temperature changes. I know 2 lakes specifically where I'm paid to remove them by property owners. Because we all know pleco's like caves. Since florida is sand, the pleco's make caves in shallow water. Eating away at the property lines. And for one, he's lost a lot of cows because the pleco's make swiss cheese out of the ground and the cows sink and die, tainting the watering hole for drinking and of course losing a lot of money over cattle. And lets face it as anyone know's that breeds fish, you can't have pleco's. They eat the eggs. So they destroy your fishery.
While I don't like to kill a fish, I know that I've speared 5 common pleco's in 1 sitting that were all over 18 inches long. I even went swimming and hand caught one (that one was a TON of fun lol) when the water temps were lower. There are soo many large plecos in this lake that his section of dock that was on land just for sunbathing and looking out on the lake without being over the water now has about 3 feet of ground that has collapsed and needed to be filled in because it was a foot deep hole right as you stepped onto the start of the dock. From the start of that dock to the actual shore line is about 5 ft. The econlockhatchee river I've seen the shorelines expand about 8 feet in the past 5 or so years. Luckily in that section it's a concrete overflow going in, and a dam going out so hopefully they don't leave there naturally.
Killing gar and bowfishing? Well, tilapia are free game because florida fish and wildlife thought they would be a great idea. Except that they are mouth brooders and they destroy other fish beds and eat the eggs. There are no limits that I've seen on the lakes that I fish in for bass. Gar, well, I've killed one on purpose. Because typically when I'm using shiners I do get a few gar, I do my best to get the hook out and let it go on its way. This prick of a fish broke my line with 2 hooks in it already (NOT swallowed) attacked and broke a bobber and it bit again. Damn fish had to go. Florida gar about 20-22 inches.
Only upside is the amount of crawfish here in almost every lake, even a dead fish that goes to the bottom technically never goes to waste.
While I don't like to kill a fish, I know that I've speared 5 common pleco's in 1 sitting that were all over 18 inches long. I even went swimming and hand caught one (that one was a TON of fun lol) when the water temps were lower. There are soo many large plecos in this lake that his section of dock that was on land just for sunbathing and looking out on the lake without being over the water now has about 3 feet of ground that has collapsed and needed to be filled in because it was a foot deep hole right as you stepped onto the start of the dock. From the start of that dock to the actual shore line is about 5 ft. The econlockhatchee river I've seen the shorelines expand about 8 feet in the past 5 or so years. Luckily in that section it's a concrete overflow going in, and a dam going out so hopefully they don't leave there naturally.
Killing gar and bowfishing? Well, tilapia are free game because florida fish and wildlife thought they would be a great idea. Except that they are mouth brooders and they destroy other fish beds and eat the eggs. There are no limits that I've seen on the lakes that I fish in for bass. Gar, well, I've killed one on purpose. Because typically when I'm using shiners I do get a few gar, I do my best to get the hook out and let it go on its way. This prick of a fish broke my line with 2 hooks in it already (NOT swallowed) attacked and broke a bobber and it bit again. Damn fish had to go. Florida gar about 20-22 inches.
Only upside is the amount of crawfish here in almost every lake, even a dead fish that goes to the bottom technically never goes to waste.
