Influence of Circle Hook Size on Hooking Efficiency, Injury, and Size Selectivity of Bluegill with Comments on Circle Hook Conservation Benefits in Recreational Fisheries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Hook size is an important consideration in the use of circle hooks as a conservation tool for minimizing the injury and mortality of marine fishes, but little is known about the role of hook size in the performance of hooks in recreational freshwater fisheries. In this study, we angled 100 bluegills Lepomis macrochirus on each of five different-sized circle hooks (1/0, 2, 6, 10, and 14). The largest hook size (1/0) had low hooking and capture efficiency but selected larger individuals. The smallest hook size also had low hooking efficiency and resulted in the selection of smaller individuals. Intermediate hook sizes captured fish of intermediate size. Jaw hooking rates generally increased with decreasing hook size, whereas roof hooking rates decreased. Gullet hooking was restricted to the three smallest hook sizes. Relative hooking depth and incidences of bleeding were uniformly low for all hook sizes. Similarly, the fish were generally easy to remove from the hook irrespective of hook size. Our mortality projections revealed no trends associated with hook size, our overall mortality rate being less than 1%. This study suggests that circle hooks function most effectively when the entire hook can fit in the mouth of the fish and when the shank-to-point distance is large enough to permit jaw hooking. Size selectivity for larger individuals can be achieved by using larger hook sizes. However, large circle hooks will also catch smaller fish that will be more likely to be hooked in injurious anatomical locations. Therefore, we recommend the use of intermediate-sized hooks for maximizing hook performance in terms of size selectivity, efficiency, and conservation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".