Great question!
Prior to 1990 in Washington our native char (bull trout/Dolly Varden) were considered just another trout and were included as part of the "trout" limit for the water in which they were caught.
In the later part of the 1980s in the local north Puget Sound area there was an interested in whether our char were Dollies or bulls, what their basic biology was, and their status. My bull trout articles talk about some of the finds of that earlier interest. Out of that work there was some concern about their status. State had seen positive population response under regulation to protect resident trout and sea-run cutthroat that allowed the majority of the females to spawn at least once prior to being harvested. After looking at the growth rates of those "S" char it was determined that a 20-inch minimum size limit would accomplish that goal resulting in a regulation change in 1990s establishing a 20-inch minimum size limit and a 2 fish bag limit. This seemed to have been an important step in elevating the status of those native char to a full game fish status.
At that time there were lots of unanswered questions about our char and those regulation changes were "best guess" assessment of what the fish needed. To check those assessments. On the Skagit in 2001 and 2002 a number of bull trout were sample with total length recorded, scales taken, phenotype noted (fluvial or anadromous), and sex was noted. A total of 215 char were sample with their scales being read for total age, age and size at first spawning and subsequent spawning history, growth patterns etc. This provided some interesting information but germane to this discussion.
For the fluvial fish that 20-inch minimum size limit protected 98% of the first-time spawners and most of the second time spawners while for the anadromous 94% of the first-time spawners were protected and about 1/2 through their second spawn. It appeared that the 20-inch size limit was about right, but the real question was how the populations responded. For one of the Skagit tribs. there was 3 years of redd counts prior to the regulation change. That was compared to counts after a decade of the regulation change. Those counts increased more 25 times, I don't have to tell you how rare it has been to see that kind of population response in any of our anadromous salmonids.
You and I would probably agree on whether we should continue to harvest some bull trout but without that opportunity it is unlikely we would still be able to target them, even as a CnR fishery.
Curt
