del..................you fool!!! to not consider netting as one of the reasons the walleye issue is at where its at would be like walking around with blinders on. do i agree the DNR might be responsible a bit, maybe.
let me spell it out for ya a little............simple math maybe even you might understand.
so you got this puddle of water with 200,000 walleyes in it. in the prime of there spawning ritual, you put a net in there and take 75,000 out..................and your gonna tell me that doesnt matter. yea right.
now if they would net out of the spawn cycle...........i could maybe see it.
Well I've tried to explain it before. But I guess I will try again. Mama Walleye starts making eggs in summer so she can spawn in the spring. If Glenn puts her in the cooler in september she won't spawn in the spring. If native man nets her in april, she won't spawn either. Same deal. September... April. no spawn. Time of year just doesn't matter. What matters is how many spawners of what size actually spawn. If they don't spawn because they were killed by an angler or by a netter it doesn't make any difference.
The thing I see is that prior to the netting ruling, the DNR really had little idea what was going on in the lake and what the harvest was and all that. There were good years and there were bad years. In the mean time anglers got better boats and gps and lake maps and 4 lane highways from the cities and the harvest went up and up.
Finally the DNR took some steps to reduce the harvest but in an imprecise manner.
Then the natives came along and wanted to net and rather than buy out the mille lacs band some agitators thought they could win in court. Thanks, bud grant of wisconsin. The natives won. They were entitled to half the sustainable harvest and the DNR was forced to figure out what that was. Some years the natives took less than they were entitled to and some years the anglers took more than their share should have been.
The DNR chose to implement a restrictive slot which meant that the angling harvest mostly came from a very restricted group of fish, almost wiping out that size fish every year. Fish that made it past that size or were already too big had nothing to worry about except poachers and hooking mortality. So there got to be a lot of big fish and some little fish and no medium sized fish. When the big fish ran out of perch and ciscoes or maybe even before, they ate the little fish. Seems nobody taught them that eating their children was bad.
The DNR could maybe have changed and fixed stuff early on but the resort owners and business folks didn't want to do anything that would stop the flow of money, so nothing changed until it was screwed up so badly it couldn't be ignored any more.
And nobody lived happily ever after.