Citizen science data suggest that a novel rig improves landing rate and reduces injury and handling time in recreational angling with artificial lures in Baltic pike (Esox lucius)
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Natural Resource Management, Environmental Impacts
- Keywords
- catch-and-release, landing rate, Bleeding, hook wound, release-rig, unhooking time, catch rate, gear effectiveness, pike
- Copyright
- © 2018 Bursell et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Citizen science data suggest that a novel rig improves landing rate and reduces injury and handling time in recreational angling with artificial lures in Baltic pike (Esox lucius) PeerJ Preprints 6:e26484v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26484v2
Abstract
The optimal terminal gear in hook-and-line recreational fishing maximizes landing rates and minimizes injury to the fish because some fish will be released after capture. We designed a novel rig configuration in artificial lure fishing for top predators and examined its effectiveness in angling for Baltic northern pike (Esox lucius ) using a citizen science approach based on observational data collected from volunteer anglers in the field. The novel rig included two changes to traditional rig designs common to artificial lure angling. First, hooks were mounted in a way giving better hook exposure and eliminating lever-arm effects from the lure to the hooks once a fish is hooked. This construction allowed the second change, being a shift to hooks 4-5 sizes smaller than those used on traditional hook mounts. We analysed observational data collected by volunteer anglers using either the novel rig or a standard rig mount in two types of artificial lures (softbait and hardbait) of the same size (about 17 cm). Using N = 768 pike contacts as input data, we showed the landing rates of pike targeted with artificial lures significantly and substantially increased from 45 % with normal-rigs to 85 % when the same lure types were fished with the novel rig configuration. Lure type and Water temperature had no effects on landing rates. Moreover, hardbaits on normal-rigs produced significantly more injury, bleeding and elevated unhooking time compared to fish captured on hardbaits with release-rigs. We conclude that simple changes to traditional hook sizes and mounts in lure fishing may benefit both anglers and the fishes that are to be released and that citizen science projects with volunteer anglers are able to provide good data in proof-of-concept studies. Further experimental studies are needed to differentiate hook size from hook mount effects because both variables were confounded in the results of the observational data presented here.
Author Comment
The main point in the changes from first to second version of this manuscript has been to emphasize that the main purpose of the release-rig is to enable the use of much smaller and better penetrating hooks - potentially leading to higher landingrates and less damage to the fish - but also to describe the differences between release-rigs and traditional in-line hookmounts. Apart from this primarily minor changes has been made.