Most natives species?
- Thread starter fatherof5
- Start date
Cool info to know. Being in the northeast Atlantic, it makes sense to me. Besides keeping fish, I enjoy fishing and watching fishing shows. Most of the fish I've always wanted to fish for are from the south/southeastern areas like you say. There's just less species of fish where I'm from and I get sick of fishing for the same species all the time.
I live in NC, lots of species of fishes, lots of them small pygmy sunfish, dwarf sunfish and lots of daters and minnows, shiners and silversides....
I'm in coastal NC right now, having lots of fun catching all the brackish killies that we don't get in TN. Of course the Tennessee River tributaries in western NC have similar fish to east TN, but the rest of the state has a very different fauna from what I'm used to.
With regards to TN rules, it's a little more complicated than that. It really was never legal to collect native fish for the aquarium, but a loophole was left open for keeping "bait" in a fancy rectangular glass bait bucket. The new law restricts which bait species can be taken away from the water in which they are caught, a sensible restriction already in place in many states that helps prevent disease transmission and bait-bucket introductions. The new rule is imperfect and inconvenient, but the old-style attitude of "they're just minners, do whatever you want with them" was unsustainable in a state that has nearly 100 threatened, endangered, or in-need-of-management species (many states don't have that many freshwater fish species in total).
I have hopes that we native fish hobbyists in Tennessee can successfully lobby for a fish-keeping exemption that will allow us to enjoy native fishes at home once again. The new rule is not aimed at us; we're hardly on the fish and game agencies' radar. [/digression]
With regards to TN rules, it's a little more complicated than that. It really was never legal to collect native fish for the aquarium, but a loophole was left open for keeping "bait" in a fancy rectangular glass bait bucket. The new law restricts which bait species can be taken away from the water in which they are caught, a sensible restriction already in place in many states that helps prevent disease transmission and bait-bucket introductions. The new rule is imperfect and inconvenient, but the old-style attitude of "they're just minners, do whatever you want with them" was unsustainable in a state that has nearly 100 threatened, endangered, or in-need-of-management species (many states don't have that many freshwater fish species in total).
I have hopes that we native fish hobbyists in Tennessee can successfully lobby for a fish-keeping exemption that will allow us to enjoy native fishes at home once again. The new rule is not aimed at us; we're hardly on the fish and game agencies' radar. [/digression]
" It really was never legal to collect native fish for the aquarium, but a loophole was left open for keeping "bait" in a fancy rectangular glass bait bucket." Lol NOTO I believe thats the same loophole used in many states. We had a discussion on the NANFA website about collecting and keeping natives for enthusiast in Tenn., I certainly hope that happens, maybe if they came out with a permit like the educational permits some states have to collect they would again allow fishkeepers to keep natives that arent endangered or threatened.
