TK made an interesting point that no one ever complains about someone keeping a big bluegill or crappie...So I'm writing to fill that void. Extensive research has been done by fisheries biologists in multiple states (Illinois, Utah, etc.) in the past twelve years that confirms beyond a doubt that the old belief that bluegill cannot be fished out, is simply not true. The small ones can't be fished out; but if there is a lake, even a large lake, that has a good population of large bluegills, angling pressure can permanently and drastically affect the size structure of the bluegill in the lake by the keeping of too many large fish. Biologists have found that two discrete populations of male bluegill exist in any body of water that has them: there are males that mature sexually at a good size, such as eight inches or better, and then there are what biologists call "sneaker males" that mature sexually at three or four inches and have inferior genetics. These sneaker males do not yet have the hallmark features of larger males such as a larger opercular tab, black scale tipping, or the hump on the forehead, and they look very similar to females of the same size; so they're able to fool males guarding nests into thinking they're females, and then they rush in and fertilize the eggs and the genetics of that population just went down a little.

When large numbers of big bluegill are kept from a body of water in a short period of time, it can permanently destroy a great big bluegill fishery. I've personally seen this happen more than once just here in middle Tennessee. It happened in the late eighties at New Lake in Lewisburg - that lake had the best big-bluegill fishing I've ever seen about four years after it opened, but even when I got in on it it was on its last legs due to anglers being meat hogs and keeping the biggest fish rather than mid-sized ones; and within a year, the big fish were gone, and now that lake is pathetic for bluegill. The same thing happened at Shellcracker Lake at Williamsport four years ago. I caught a bluegill there five years ago that wasn't huge but was very healthy, and I made a mental note to go back the following year; sure enough, spring of 2009 there were lots of very big bluegill. But word got out, and the meat hogs arrived in force: in April that year the angling report on the website they used to have for the concession stated that they couldn't believe how many big bluegill were being caught. Then just two months later the same angling report stated that they didn't know what had happened to the bluegill that year but none were being caught - they had already forgotten how many were yanked out two months earlier. That fishery was ruined in a span of two months, and it won't be the same again without drastic changes to the existing regulations.

That's what I thought of when I read the thread about the Carroll County Lake. There will probably be some nice-sized bluegill caught out of that lake, and possibly some big ones next year; but our present regulations in this state regarding bluegill are pretty lacking, and unless they are changed, that lake's bluegill fishing will be a shadow two years from now of what it is now. Our public lakes will never have bluegill fishing that's any more than a shadow of what it could be with progressive, up-to-date regulation. I even tried to get TWRA to implement lower creel limits along with a slot limit for bluegill on Shellcracker Lake four years ago, but they weren't interested.