As Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s Cody Region fisheries biologists are looking into changing regulations to allow anglers more spring fishing time in the North Fork of the Shoshone River near the Gibb’s Bridge area, is there a possibility a change could significantly increase injuries to fish from a higher volume of catch and release fishing?

A fisheries biologist in Casper is studying hook injuries, and has included data from the Cody Region in his findings. While the Cody Region has one of the lowest percentages of fish with severe hooking injuries in the state, including data from the North Fork, the Wedding of the Waters near Thermopolis and the Bighorn River, if closures on the North Fork are shortened and lower harvests are implemented, there will likely be more fish caught and released.

As any angler knows, hooks can injure your catch even if you don’t fancy a plate of fresh fish for dinner. At the same time, local biologists are looking into regulation changes to lower stress on trout and add to their already sterling level of hook injuries.

Cody Region Fisheries Supervisor Sam Hochhalter told a crowd at Shreve Lodge in September, shortening the closure on the North Fork will mean lowering harvest limits.

“We believe that we can offer a longer season, we can shorten the dates of that closure and provide more weeks to fish the lower river,” he told the group of mostly local anglers at the meeting, but with a caveat. “We can only do that if we reduce the baggage. We cannot offer more days to fish and run the risk that we're going to harvest more fish.”

That means lower daily harvests for anglers. Currently, creel limits for the North Fork of the Shoshone River drainage upstream of Gibbs Bridge on trout are three per day, or in possession. No more than two shall be cutthroat trout; and, no more than one trout shall exceed 18 inches. But while the wild river population isn’t being supplemented by stocking, it is getting help with the closure. The seasonal closures offer relative safety for many trout during their spawning season from April 1 to June 30 on the lower portion of the North Fork and on a small portion of the reservoir from April 1 to July 14.

Without too deep of a deep dive into the data, increasing the amount of days for fishermen, combined with the possibility that it could result in more catch and release fishing, would likely increase the percentage of hook-injured fish in the waterway.

Game and Fish research shows lower recruitment (the number of fish surviving to enter a fishery) is a concern when fish are injured by hooks. Jeff Glaid, a fisheries management biologist out of Casper, has been studying the issue since 2018 and presented his findings recently to the Game and Fish Commission. Glaid developed a ranking system for hook injuries while studying conditions in the North Platte. He had found startling results there, with more than 87% receiving an injury ranking and nearly a quarter of the fish receiving a rank representing severe to massive injuries from catch and release fishing.

“[We] started to get quite a lot more reports from anglers concerned about the level of hooking injuries that they were seeing in terms of a qualitative or an esthetic evaluation of their fishing enjoyment,” Glaid said.

The ranking system he developed is based somewhat on injury rankings veterinarians use on other animals.

Ranking injuries

A rank of zero will have no conspicuous damage. There won't be any marks in their mouth, any kind of scar tissue or missing pieces off their face or hooks lodged in their bodies. A rank of one represents little scarring or blemishes. A rank of two represents trout missing maxilla (a pair of bones that form the upper jaw, roof of the mouth, and parts of the eye socket and nose of animals) embedded or infected wounds that are quite large, but no impediment to feeding or for the fish's ability to continue to persist. Rank three is where it starts to get into the biologically meaningful levels of damage. This is where the fish have eye damage, start to have infringement on gills, blindness or mouth damage severe enough to affect a trout’s ability to feed or reproduce. The rank of four is severe or massive levels of injury, like completely dislocated jaws or other injuries resulting in trout being unable to feed or reproduce.

“These are the fish that ought to be maybe mercy killed because they're completely unable to feed at this point,” Glaid said in his presentation.

In the North Platte and other Casper-area waterways, the pressure is high and the bigger a fish gets, the higher the likelihood of severe injury, he said. And, with the higher rates of injuries from hooks in these waterways, the lower fecundity (the ability to produce an abundance of offspring or new growth) the trout will have.

Respect your trout

The results of hook injuries begs for fishermen to be exceedingly careful handling trout. Without caution, a higher level of loss is possible. For example, handling fish in the heat of an August day can be stressful to fish.

While the research is important still statewide and possibly further, the level of ranked injuries is much lower in the Cody Region. Fishing pressure and trout recruitment plays an important part in the equation, said Cody Region fisheries biologist Joe Skorupski.

“We do not see anything close to what those guys (the North Platte) see in terms of injury rates,” he said in a Wednesday interview with the Tribune. “We don't have the pressure that they have and then there could be other issues in play in terms of population size and recruitment.”

Anglers on the North Fork harvest at a higher rate than that of the North Platte and those individual fish severely injured in the process are getting harvested at a faster rate. The North Fork and other area waterways have different survival rates and recruitment rates, completely changing the dynamics of hook injuries as compared to the extreme pressure on the North Platte River.

For example, the North Platte has poor recruitment, which has been increasing with the quickly growing rates of pressure. Those individual trout are long-lived and stay in that system for a long time, Skorupski said.

“There's just a higher probability that they're going to be caught repeatedly, especially with higher pressure. Whereas on the North Fork you have a population that turns over a lot more rapidly, one that's driven by higher harvest rates, so we're going to see less injury rates because they're getting harvested more,” he said. “Despite lower survival rates in the North Fork, the system also has high recruitment rates, so that population turns over more rapidly.”

The injury ranking system is an improvement for biologists in the state, and understanding the results of injury to individual trout and how that affects recruitment is an important resource for conservation efforts. However, with only about 10% of fish ranking 2-3 on the scale in the Cody Region, in many ways the North Fork is the opposite picture of fishery health than the North Platte River and other high pressure destinations.

Yet, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement. The regulations being discussed in a recent survey sent to anglers in the Big Horn Basin are still up in the air, so nothing is set in stone at this point.

Another issue Skorupski cited in catch and release safety is the current limit of only one trout over 18-inches. The necessity of handling a wiggly fish to measure its length is counterintuitive to reducing stress on fish, he said.

“A lot of the fish in the North Fork right now are between 17- and 19-inches. So [anglers] basically have to handle fish pretty heavily to see if it's over 18. So that increases stress.”

Ways to lower injury rates

The Cody crew has handled over 1,000 fish in their part of Glaid’s research. Of those individuals, 88% showed no signs of hooking injuries of note. If, in the Cody Region’s continuing population studies, they saw the rate of injuries rise significantly, they could consider some of the same restrictions seen on sections of the North Platte. Terminal tackle restrictions could be necessary to prevent increased mortality, including restricting the use of live bait.

But Skorupski doesn’t think that will be necessary.

“We get a lot of folks that really like fishing the Bighorn… where guys are catching and releasing a ton, and our terminal tackle is also unrestricted. And you see a lot of guys with spinners, worms, etc., but we're still not seeing those injury rates that are even remotely close to what they see in the North Platte,” he said.

Hochhalter said as much while speaking to a group of hardcore anglers in September.

“The bottom line is; the current regulations provide a sustainable fishery, as would a host of alternative regulations that wouldn’t increase harvest or catch-and-release mortality,” he said. “A closure, in some fashion, is necessary to provide those trout with adequate time to enter the tributaries and spawn. But we absolutely could shorten the closure in terms of the number of days each spring.”

The key here could be the level of care anglers on the North Fork take when practicing catch and release. Catch and release fishing is a great conservation strategy, but simply letting a fish go does not guarantee it will live, according to a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“The actions you take before, during, and after you land a fish can improve the chances of survival, keep fish populations healthy, and keep fishermen fishing,” the report said.

They suggest considering use of barbless hooks, nets that don’t injure the fish, strong enough line to bring the fish in quickly and handling the fish as little as possible, among the many prescribed conservation-minded suggestions offered.

Skorupski said those practicing catch and release in the Cody Region are largely respectful and careful to ensure survival. But even with anglers looking to harvest fish and using terminal methods like bait and spin-casting lures, the current harvest is sustainable in the North Fork, he said.

Conserving the Blue Ribbon fishery on the North Fork, which has far reaching implications for economies near the bucket-list fishing destination and for future anglers, is important. With that comes the compromise between regulation and enjoyment of the resource. Skorupski said all regulations on the waterway are still up in the air, if there is even a change to regulations on the horizon.