I had wanted to ask you about the fishing effort invested to obtain your existing samples. In one the papers you have on angling vulnerability, there are graphs on a population of 110 LMB subjected to 40 hours of fishing effort. Some caught 4 times, 3 times, 2 times, 1 times, and some not at all. So just using those proportions I used your report above to estimate your population. The numbers I got ranged from 12 to 17.5 LMB with an average of 15. So the caveats are. How much fishing effort have you put in and do both populations have similar populations in terms of vulnerability to angling. My sense is that you have yet to put in a corresponding 40 hours and when you have there will be more unique samples and some fish being caught 4 times.

We can ask from another perspective. Has the population reached a forage limitation? For the time being the answer is no. At present LMB sizes, a forage limitation would indicate a population between 30 and 40 LMB per acre. But your LMB are growing at the model's ad libitum growth (with some exceeding and others below, but pretty dang close to when averaged). Because of this I think the population is below 30 LMB/acre for sizes exceeding 11" This probably owing to those GSF which colonized before you stocked fingerling LMB.

As for real life? I think the model's accuracy is remarkable. It predicts the growth of your fish from dates in September to yesterday's date pretty dang good IMHO. I don't expect it to be exact and all it needs to be in order to be practical for me is reasonably accurate for a population. I can work with that. Above, you can infer its predictions at the 1 year anniversaries of the September catches. The first fish is predicted to gain 1.74 lbs from 1.38 lbs to 3.12 lbs (on 9.10.25). The second fish is predicted to gain 2.39 lbs from 2.13 lbs to 4.52 lbs on (9.29.25). Will they be exactly that? I think probably not. Variation of appropriate sized prey during the intervening time will influence each individually and possibly differently. The model is one of ad libitum feeding. If the forage isn't sufficiently plentiful to support ad libitum feeding, then one or both could easily fall short. From the model we can understand the consumption required for a gain in time and even whether an arbitrary gain is easily achievable or extremely rare (possibly impossible) for a particular climate and time span. Eventually, in real life, the LMB will begin to diverge from the model and show signs that growth is slowing. This will happen when the production of forage will no longer support ad libitum feeding.

It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so - Will Rogers