One of the United States’ largest fisheries is hiding in plain sight. Recreational freshwater anglers in the lower 48 states catch – and keep – far more fish than any official body has estimated, according to new research from our team of North American fishery scientists.
Specifically, our analysis, which integrated thousands of recreational fishing surveys across the U.S., found that people who engage in recreational fishing in the country’s lakes, ponds and reservoirs catch between 2 billion and 6 billion fish each year. Many of them practice catch-and-release fishing, but even after accounting for all the fish released, we estimated that they keep between 230,000 and 670,000 metric tons of fish in the U.S. alone.
