Good point, its alway best to check with your local DNR or conservation dept before you go and collect fish; in some states Longear can be collected, in Wisconsin they are threatened and cannot be legally collected, so what is legal in one state oftentimes is not in another.AOmonsta;4920722;4920722 said:
Keeping Sunfish...an article
- Thread starter sandtiger
- Start date
AOmonsta;4920722; said:
Only certain species in certain states. Missouri only recognizes bluegill, longear, greens and warmouth as gamefish and ONLY if they are over 3" long. Under that they and all other sunfish are considered baitfish and you can harvest up to 150 of them.
I have seen convict cichlids crossbreding with green sunfish in my local creek, since someone dumped them in there. the greens were destroying the convicts. They were eating the babies by the mouthfull. Even the adult convicts could not fend off the greens from the nest beds.
warmouth;4922697; said:
I know here in Rhode Island it is illegal to catch gamefish in traps/nets also. This is the case in much of the U.S.
One thing about state laws and regulations. If you look at official state laws, some states forbid owning native fishes. However if you ask your local game warden most of the time they could care less. I wish they would ease up on some of the restrictions. What sense does it make to be able to catch and kill a fish but not catch and own a fish? 
westtncat;5014809; said:One thing about state laws and regulations. If you look at official state laws, some states forbid owning native fishes. However if you ask your local game warden most of the time they could care less. I wish they would ease up on some of the restrictions. What sense does it make to be able to catch and kill a fish but not catch and own a fish?
They worry about releasing it back into the wild.
westtncat;5015037; said:
In captivity fish can get diseases and parasites they might not otherwise get in the wild, especially if they have had contact with non-natives. A sick fish released into the wild has the potential to spread disease.
I absolutely agree with Sandtiger. It's not just a hypothetical risk, either; the fish viral disease KHV and the amphibian fungal disease Bd have both been transferred from captive to wild populations, where they are causing mass die-offs, and in the case of Bd, extinctions.
In Tennessee a major reason behind the new collecting regulations is to keep people from introducing fish to different drainages. In many cases the fish in one stream include different but related species from the fish in the adjacent stream; if you innocently collect some fish for bait or pets and then release them into a nearby stream, not the one you originally collected them from, you could introduce a competitor or cause hybridization to occur. This would eventually lead to homogenization of the stream fauna across the region, and we would lose a lot of species diversity. Tennessee has well over 300 fish species, and nearly a third of them have some kind of conservation status.
Which is not to say I entirely agree with the new regulations. They go too far in impinging the rights of native fish keepers, and not far enough to prevent bait bucket introductions, in my opinion.
In Tennessee a major reason behind the new collecting regulations is to keep people from introducing fish to different drainages. In many cases the fish in one stream include different but related species from the fish in the adjacent stream; if you innocently collect some fish for bait or pets and then release them into a nearby stream, not the one you originally collected them from, you could introduce a competitor or cause hybridization to occur. This would eventually lead to homogenization of the stream fauna across the region, and we would lose a lot of species diversity. Tennessee has well over 300 fish species, and nearly a third of them have some kind of conservation status.
Which is not to say I entirely agree with the new regulations. They go too far in impinging the rights of native fish keepers, and not far enough to prevent bait bucket introductions, in my opinion.
