BY MICHAEL SULLIVAN

Unlike birders, we fish lovers can seldom go to a lake or river and simply “see” a fish. To see one, we usually need to catch it, hence The Dilemma. I practice catch-and-release fishing with near religious fervor, but even with my professional and personal experience of handling thousands of fish they are sometimes hurt and, sometimes, they die. The question is: can such occasional losses from catch-and-release fishing be safely ignored or are they a cause for concern?

It turns out that this question is harder to answer than one might expect.

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