Fish Biologist on 20 Years of Fixing America's Broken Lakes

Fisheries biologist David Beasley joins Bailey and Steve for a deep dive into what actually makes a lake healthy or unhealthy, unpacking sediment oxygen demand, harmful algal blooms, and why hydrilla and blue-green algae take over neglected water bodies. Beasley breaks down grass carp strategies, nutrient cycling, and the internal load problem lurking at the bottom of nearly every lake, from small farm ponds to giants like Lake Okeechobee. The conversation takes a hard turn into fisheries management history, challenging whether catch and release culture has actually helped or hurt bass populations across the country. If you care about lake health, bass fishing, and the science behind why some fisheries thrive while others struggle, this episode is packed with insight you won't hear anywhere else.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

All right. Welcome to the Serious Angler Podcast, everyone. As always, I'm your host, Bailey Eichbrett, and we are back with the man, Mr. Steven Barden, for another edition of The Real Biology. And Steve, we got a good one ahead. But man, how is Texas? Uh, as we post this, this is August, but uh as we're getting into the August months, how is the great state of Texas doing?

SPEAKER_03 0:20

Well, it's hot. And I don't complain about the heat. I live in Texas for a reason. I like it warm. Uh, but we had torrential rainfall. Um, you know, there's parts of Texas that had 30 inches of rain over the weekend, and then you follow that with heat. And so we've had some fish kills. You know, my phone's been going off with you know, people needing help, and it gets to be that tough time of the year where you really got to get your work done early. Everybody's skewing their hours to be done just after lunch, and then you know, you get things like fish kill and you gotta go do the investigation, and it's just uh it's tough, man. It's a tough from now till September 1st is just a little tough to live in Texas.

SPEAKER_04 1:08

Worth it for the rest of the 360s.

SPEAKER_03 1:10

Worth it, baby. Worth it. And look, it we're tough people, you know. Uh you gotta be. Um, I know today um will be 107, probably feel like 111 or so. Sure. Um you know, so you got your liquid IV, you got your water, you're you know you're getting up early, you're getting your day done, you're getting back. We've got a really cool project this week on Lake Waco putting in these big bubblers um at the dam of the lake. You know, MLF competed on Waco. I did a habitat project there a couple of years ago. I put this, uh, these diffusers out, and now we're doubling the amount of diffusers. And they go in 50 foot of water and they just they take compressed air and they boil it from the bottom to the surface at 50 foot. The thread fin school around it, they're eating everything, the the hybrid stripers, uh, even the you know, white bass, and even the largemouth. And Waco has a has a pretty good population of all three, but they school around these diffusers, eating you know, all the shad that are coming up. These bass are just schooling constantly. So we're going from five diffusers up to 11. Um, that's like a full day all hands-on-deck project because it's thousands of feet of airline, weighted to the bottom, and it's a cool project. Um, so yeah, we're we're loving it. It's hot, but we're still getting cool things done. How is New York?

SPEAKER_04 2:45

Uh I was gonna say hot, but uh I'm not gonna say anything anymore. Uh it's 82. 84, 84, right? Uh it's a little toasty, but not too bad. Uh, this week's gonna be fun too for for it being a hotter week in the north, anyway. I'm headed down to the Susquehanna River tomorrow for a week of fishing. So looking forward to that because it'd be nice in the river, get to wade and heard the water's low. So I mean it's gonna mean a lot of waiting, which is gonna be fun. I always look forward to that uh those events because the tournaments allow us to actually get out of the kayak and fish. Um, so that's a cool part of that, and obviously more refreshing when you're in the water versus not. But uh that'll be a cool part.

SPEAKER_03 3:26

You can kayak to wherever you want to be, then you can get out, and your kayak just kind of tags behind you. Correct.

SPEAKER_04 3:32

You gotta always gotta be tethered to your kayaks. You gotta have like you know, rope of some sorts, and obviously not something egregious like a 50-foot rope, but like I think I don't even know if they have it in the rules of how long it is, but I usually just use like a like an eight to ten foot lanyard so that it's it's behind me at all points, and then obviously certain pools you can get out and fish that way, and it kind of adds a different element to the game, which is fun. And it's it's one of those places, honestly. I fished a few tournaments there, always had great success because just river fishing comes natural, but it is it's hard to get into a tournament strategy mindset because it's a gorgeous place, but also the style of fishing is more I don't mean this in a bad term, but childish, if you will. Like it just brings you back to being a kid again, adventurous, and you get more wrapped up in the adventure seeking, and you're like, oh crap, we're fishing a tournament. Like, I got you. It's it's good.

SPEAKER_03 4:24

A lot of the experience is what you're saying. Just being in nature, experiencing it, a lot of light gear, I would guess.

SPEAKER_04 4:32

Um in regards to like you're saying like rods and stuff like that. Yeah, um, not really, honestly. Uh, I mean, some of the the best success I've found there is with just heavy spinnerbait setups and fishing bigger stuff. Uh, but it has been one on light stuff, smaller tackle, and this has come out after the fact, so don't worry about it. But like tiny little top water bugs, uh like soft plastic bugs, like I got a few here. Actually, you know, I'll I'll show the bait to the camera. How about that?

SPEAKER_03 5:02

I don't know how this works, so let's see. I'm gonna narrate it because uh not everybody is watching.

SPEAKER_04 5:08

So I got a little, it's a one and a half inch little OSP bug that you rig, and it's like you gotta use light tackle for it in order to cast it far enough. Like you just kind of shimmy it up on the top of the water, and they come up and eat it like a top water. Um okay, so you're like Texas rigging it. Yeah, I kind of use like a little hover hook, and I just kind of rope it through there and I keep it up on the surface. And it's for some of those bigger fish that I've seen a lot of baits that you know they might bump a spinnerbait, chase it, not fully eat it, where you need something a little bit different. I'm sure the dice and the I mean I got some urchin baits, of course, rigged up just in case, but um, it's just something a little bit different. But otherwise, it's like it's a spinnerbait, a little bug style bait, you know, like a Sanko 2 you can throw in there, or like a topwater, uh like a plopping style bait, like a Chapo or something like that. That usually is the biggest players. Um, but otherwise, no, it's just typical river fishing. There's some big smallmouth in there, and uh, I just look forward to getting down there all the time. So it's it should be fun. But before then, we have a pretty banger episode today.

SPEAKER_03 6:13

Oh, this can be a great episode. Uh we joke, there's a lot of nuggets in this one. Get your sauce out. It it is a full meal. Um full meal. David, David Beasley, one of the great private sector biologists, national private sector biologists, not you know, not just a single state kind of guy, national level, writes for Palm Boss magazine, uh, you know, 20-year vet. He joins us, and the truth is it's one of those just open episodes. We we meander, we move, we talk a lot of different things, we talk a lot of theory. If you love the science, this is an episode for you.

SPEAKER_04 6:52

Heck yeah. We've got a lot of different angles, but there'll be a part two. Uh because as Steve said, it's very nuggety, is the term that Steve likes to use now. Uh I like that nuggety. Nuggety, very nuggety episode. Uh, what awesome one, and look forward to it. I think without further ado, let's get into it, Steve, with uh Mr. David Beasley. All right, folks. We're joining Mr. David Beasley, and David sounds like uh we got a fellow New Yorker in the house tonight. And uh, how are we doing, man? Doing great. Thanks for having me on here.

SPEAKER_02 7:22

Excited to talk to you guys.

SPEAKER_04 7:23

Yeah, Steve, I think judging by the backgrounds of all three of our studios here, David has the most inviting. I see the pool table in the back. Uh, it looks like much better of a time than than ours.

SPEAKER_03 7:35

Yeah, Dave Dave started a couple years before me in the private sector, and you can see that he made all the right decisions, and I made all the wrong ones.

SPEAKER_02 7:47

Uh it's we'll see about that. We'll see about that.

SPEAKER_04 7:50

It sounds like you grew up in an awesome neck of the woods, too, very similar to mine uh on the finger lakes, though. And that's uh it's a special place to be in, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_02 7:58

Yeah, upstate New York's awesome. I absolutely love it. I've had uh blessing and luxury to kind of work on lakes throughout the United States, and I think New York's a bit underrated, but a lot of their lakes, um, from my perspective, uh, you know, at least growing up, they they behaved a lot better than than ponds and lakes in the southeast and out west and stuff and areas. So um it's a great part of the country. Everyone should visit it, you know, spend time there if you can.

SPEAKER_04 8:25

There, I think that's exactly what you're saying is a big reason why a lot of you know your your big time pro-angles, especially, or just really anyone from the south that's had the opportunity to come north, they'll always say, What are their favorite places to fish? And they'll say Champlain, the Finger Lake, something like something up north, because right there's no secret that we I just call them dumber fish, but I think obviously they get less pressured, but uh it is uh more bitey fish, that's for sure. That that's that's for dang sure. You know, our our bad days are better than most good days. Yeah, that's exciting.

SPEAKER_02 8:59

I mean, there's good parts everywhere, but um there's something too some deeper water at times too, with good vegetation and good water clarity. Um, I there's just something to it uh when it comes to fishing, in my perspe from my perspective.

SPEAKER_04 9:11

Yeah, thank you. Well, Steve, let's kick things off. What do we got on the docket?

SPEAKER_03 9:16

Well, Dave is um kind of I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna paint you as part of the Bob Lus crew, uh, but I I don't think that's truly true. But you are you're one of the OGs. You have written for Pond Boss, you've you've worked in New York, you've built the private sector, you're part of that crew, and you're just like two years older than me, so I guess I I kind of consider myself part of that crew as well. But I, you know, we've had Troy Goldsbey, and we've had Bob Lush, we've had a couple private sector people, and I I sprinkle them in as guests um because I don't want to overwhelm everybody, and we're not just gonna talk about pond management because David has a national presence, he's worked across the country. There are celebrities that know David Beasley, like he can text with people that are A-list movie stars, um, but he's also worked on a lot of projects that maybe are in communities or cities that you you are involved in. So I think that he brings this immense amount of knowledge that our audience is gonna love. Um, and Dave, I always I like to start at the beginning, you know, I like to get to know people a little bit. So for our audience, I wouldn't mind if we started like with high school, college, Dave, and kind of told your beginning of your story.

SPEAKER_02 10:38

Yeah, happy to. So um yeah, I grew up in upstate New York and uh one of those few folks who uh from a young age, as young as I can remember, knew what I wanted to do when I was older. And it just carried through. Like it happened to work out. And so um, you know, grew up in the country, you know, with a pond in the backyard, just just you know, doing everything kids do with ponds in their backyard, and um, you know, had great internships along the way, was really engaged. I knew kind of like the direction I wanted to go, and then I I landed this job in New York and um uh I guess it was my third year in undergrad, where uh uh 5,000 acre preserve in upstate New York is 450 acres of water and um relatively unlimited budget with a fish hatchery, 60 grow out ponds, and then four lakes. And um you grew fish. Uh we we raised 27 or 26 unique species of fish on the property uh and stocked them out in the lakes, and then we took the highest end of folks fishing on weekends, typically anytime really, but weekends were uh the fishing days, and the weekdays were when you grew the fish. And uh that is actually when I met Bob Lusk, and he was paid for uh a couple years to actually teach me everything he knew while I was in that environment. So we had a relatively unlimited budget. Bob Lusk teaching me everything he could think of based on the stuff I was exposed to, and um, yeah, it was a it was just an absolute springboard of a career, you know. Uh both Bob and others would say I was like 20 at the time, maybe 21. They're like, Dave, you you have more experience than a 40-year-old who's been grinding at this, and like somehow you've kind of just I got this platform um to build off of, and um, you know, I got a hunger for it, and uh I didn't grow up with money, but I was at that job around people who could both get stuff done financially and they had a mindset of anything as possible, and somehow I kind of just I wouldn't call it entirely all luck, right? I had opportunity and I didn't screw it up really, but like this opportunity came and I capitalized on it and um certainly a lot of good fortune and blessing in the in the process there, but um yeah, just had incredible exposure, and then that just led me to be able to recreate that across the country um for the better part of 20 years um since then. So uh it was a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_04 13:06

Is there a a highlighted project that kind of sticks out in your mind that you don't have to throw names out there if you don't want to, but like a a build that kind of is like your your top of the mountain right now?

SPEAKER_02 13:20

Well, yeah, there's there's definitely um it's it's kind of interesting how that that target is evolving, right? It's like once you hit your goal, then there's there's more, right? And there's so there's uh my targets and my goals keep um growing, and uh, but my capabilities are as well. Uh I would have to say, probably going back even like 15 years, some of the clients I got early on, you know, 17 years ago, even huge accomplishments because um uh when I was younger, uh it's really hard to gain the trust of someone when you're 20 years old, 23 years old, uh, where you know what you're doing, you know what you're talking about, but you have to convince them to spend six figures on a small water body and accomplish something that they didn't even dream of. You dreamt it for them. You convince them they can accomplish it, and then you build it over the course of four or five years. Uh uh I I would say some all-female fisheries, you know, double-digit all-female fisheries younger in my career were probably those kind of gateway, almost dopamine releases that uh just fed this passion that I have to better understand the food web because um you you can go different directions, and some folks go the genetic route. They you have to become um well-rounded, but you can't be a subject matter expert on literally everything in this field um when it comes to pushing the envelope on what's possible, right? So you can push like the folks at Red Hills are genetic stuff, but you can't push that and also be the best, you know, limnologist or water quality or food web, you know, primary productivity biologist possible. Uh I just don't think it's realistic to pursue both simultaneously and and truly, because again, we're um uh we're we're building this out. Like it's not mature, it's not established. This is new science applied on a daily basis uh and and continually improving. And uh we're learning a lot, like a lot of things I think that were thought to be true are turning out to be maybe less true, maybe uh not that they were inaccurate, but they may be more temporary or they weren't the full picture. And so um I would say the most gratifying thing in my career has been the direction of uh pursuing primary productivity, right? Your phytoplankton, your zooplankton, your invertebrates and all that, and just kind of creating an environment where they thrive. Turns out they thrive uh when stress is really low. And if you maintain an environment where those sensitive organisms are in a stress-free environment, well, turns out all your fish are in a stress-free environment as well. And so it like has this contagious type knock-on effect upstream um into higher levels of the food web. So uh yeah, that's but that that isn't a one type that that was uh a culmination of decades, right, to accomplish that. The the early wins of growing double-digit fish quickly, um, those are kind of what get you hooked, I think, as a private biologist.

SPEAKER_04 16:36

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SPEAKER_03 16:57

That's so true, Dave. So true. I think of uh, you know, like I'm in Texas. You you've done work in Texas, and you know, our state record is 1818 and has been that way for 35 years, 36 years. Um, and I think of a lot of like like my early accomplishments in my career was chasing down that number. And you know, you know how close uh both of us have been, or maybe have exceeded it. And it's one of those things that uh, you know, now like my staff, I still push like those are the goals y'all should have. But for me, I'm like, that is so boring. It's just so boring.

SPEAKER_02 17:42

Yeah, no, I um the bigger the water, the less boring it gets for me, right? But I agree with you 100%. I agree with you a hundred percent. Uh, on to more complex, more um challenging things, and it's not that growing state record or double-digit fish isn't one of the most challenging things you could ever pursue, and one of the most gratifying things you could pursue, but it's also um it's a little narrow-minded when it comes to making a difference, making an impact, and actually uh uh and I say impact, I'm talking like we can impact tens of thousands of anglers by fixing a larger water body, or you impact you know, a half dozen anglers, you fix a private water body. Um, and things are a little easier when your budget's relatively um unlimited. You know, when you have six-figure plus budgets on these small impoundments, it it does get easier. Uh, at that point, I do think the genetics need to catch up a little bit. Uh, I mean, if you think about it, 19 pound bass or eight, eighteen and a half pound bass. How many billions of bass, you know, did that one fit, you know, that one fish, the odds of it, of it having the right genetics, it's it's billions or trillions of fish, right? And I don't know the the statistics on it, but when you stock 20 bass per acre in a small impoundment, it's like what are the odds you have those genetics, right? And so it just comes back to like, can you consistently grow double-digit fish? Can you can you at least get them past 12? Um, and then see see uh where things can go. Uh but but for me, I find that once you get say above certainly above 50 acres, but preferably above 80, 85 acres or so, these ecosystems start managing themselves a little more, and you're just um harvesting or stocking or doing some management-related stuff. Uh and you're really more just encouraging the fishery to go in a direction versus like manipulating it in a forceful way that's artificial. So, and I guess an easy word to describe that would be sustainable, right? So the the bigger the water body, and not that 50 acres is big, it's small, but like a lot of the people pushing for double-digit fish are on the private side. I mean, 50 acres is a big water body, a big good size water body to the average private individual doing that. But as we go into more public water or larger impoundments, you know, 500 acres, thousand acres, all the way up to you know, 50,000 acres, it's um it the systems kind of they take care of themselves a lot better. And uh to me, that's exciting to be able to really understand what is holding this system back and how do we unlock its true potential without just artificially manipulating things. Because if we can figure out, and not even if we can, when we figure out how to unlock that potential, it truly is sustainable. Like you can repeat that as long as nature lets you. I mean, drought or you know, hurricane type flooding events, like they change ecosystems. I mean, there's different things that change ecosystems, but um, in general, it's just much more sustainable and and more rewarding.

SPEAKER_03 20:54

Yeah, those are great points. I think as as you kind of move through your career, I think this is a natural part. Like you look for the goals, then at some point you build a team, and then you like give the team some goals. And then I think that at least from my observation of you, the next step was like a more of a research purpose, as in let's let's take pieces of fisheries management and research how do I do it better. And because you came from the private sector, like I get the mentality just like you do. Like a lot of these projects, like you said, like the the owners, they don't have the vision yet. So whenever you talk to them and you go through that like vision casting phase that Bob Lusk is so good at, uh, and you learn about the owner and their goals. One of the things you're really good at is layering in okay, I can I can make your fishery into that, but also I can learn this fisheries technique that I can use on everybody else.

SPEAKER_02 21:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 21:58

Yeah, give me some.

SPEAKER_02 22:00

examples of like what you you do with that yeah yeah so i i've actually always viewed this as a bit of a co-op like if you're um one of my clients uh it's like they all get better so one client might be and i i some of them do burn the you know we're burning 30 grand on research a year on some of these projects but we don't have to spread that out and kind of learn about five different things we just learn about that one thing really well and then on another project we'll learn about either the same thing so we have a sample size that's sufficient or we'll be learning about something else but collectively they're all benefiting from from from learning and and you just you have to be true to the data right it's got to be a data driven adaptive management approach um and a lot of fisheries guys they they're very good at what they do but they kind of lose sight of that last that last little bit of effort like do we really need to weigh and measure every four inch bluegill we caught in that sample well I think we do uh technically you don't right anybody can look over the bow of the boat and say hey we've got plenty of bait but how do we quantify that over time and how do we determine what's really working and what isn't and um it's it's just this discipline to collecting the data that uh it's boring in some ways like it's not the fun part right and I've actually I share this with people a bunch like when you go go back to the primary productivity side and I'm trying to grow the best plankton possible like you have to become well versed in water quality and it's one of the most boring things like I I and I know some people it's their whole life and it's their passion and they love it but they're not normal folks like the the average person doesn't absolutely fall in love with water quality i you know it's much easier to to fall in love with a you know eight pound bass with a relative weight of 160 that's three years old like it's just so much easier to to do that and so um yeah I I I don't know um where do you want to go from there?

SPEAKER_03 24:06

Like I mean no I'm I think that this is part of the journey I was I was telling my wife 15 years ago if you had a July fish kill it's dissolved oxygen it's turnover what's your solution well you know we need surface agitation to get us through the next week then we need bottom diffusion we're gonna have to rebound you know maybe we're gonna monitor oxygen in the future maybe we won't who knows it'll depend on budget today like this weekend I was getting text messages from a a guy in South Carolina that was having a fish kill and you should go you know you start asking them the same questions you always ask like hey did you when was the last rainfall? What was your water temperature? You start layering in the stuff and I'm like do you have blue paint color in your water and he's like yeah I do and I'm like I think you're having a blue green algae kill. Where was that 15 years ago? You know what I mean? It's like you learn these things and the water quality part gets so exciting. And that's kind of as I think about like okay you go from like these these trophy statistics to this research and then at some point I think in every biologist it's like private sector biologist career you get to the outreach phase. And I feel like you were in the outreach phase for a long time with your former employer and now you're like at the peak of it. But I want to talk um a little bit about kind of the outreach to communities and going into some of these projects and I preface this with I know that you have had the opportunity to sit in front of cities, HOAs, communities and talk about vegetation control or cyanobacteria control. Walk us through the process from the private sector side like does a city just honestly show up with a bag of money and say kill everything or what is going on?

SPEAKER_02 25:59

Yeah well um from my experience right and we all have slightly different experiences but I I do have a nice broad net to pull from um a lot of the times when we're involved when I get involved with a project there's a problem right there's a known issue whether it's the fish kill whether it's an uh odor issue oftentimes it's present in some vegetation or algae that's affecting aesthetics or clogging some pumps or it's you know beaches are closed it could be bacteria even like E. coli and fecal coliform but there's a known issue in general and these are oftentimes uh in almost all cases scenarios where there is an operating budget for the water body on some level they just maybe they're just not spending enough or I wouldn't say they're ever really doing the wrong thing with the money. The only thing you can ever do that's really wrong would be to spend too much money on data collection and not enough on action. Like at some point you got to spend money on action. I would say if anything these sites are oftentimes light on the data. They've just been taking the action they they see the algae they see the plant they go and they kill it. But a lot of times when I'm working with these folks you really need to try to dial back and just understand what the problem is right and so we first take that kind of educational outreach approach of sharing with them why they are where they are and try to tell that story using real data versus more emotion or just assumptions right and uh you know so we grab water quality data and some of these folks already have it historically or um but grabbing water quality data and sediment data incredibly helpful for kind of painting the narrative the also also you have uh the historical context like what have they experienced over last two three decades like what has gone on has it always behaved has it always misbehaved like um what I find a lot of times is these systems are um and it could be any pond right this isn't just city and hoas here but like they they behave to a point and then they start misbehaving in lakes and general ponds they there's a point in time where they just start misbehaving and then there's actually a point in time where they're consistently misbehaving. It's like it went from things were pretty good to something's out of wax or out of balance to now we're continually out of balance right and so when we're talking with these folks uh we we do want to try to understand where on that spectrum are they for that as well as what is the public um risk right is there a true public health risk is this more of an aesthetics is there a compliance like a regulatory issue that we're gonna get hit with you know six or seven figure fines um is there just some response uh ecological responsibility they should just be doing things a certain way just because it's the right thing to do and um but I I would just say starting with the water and the sediment data and understanding the symptoms that they're experiencing I I mean it's always great to also have fisheries data but it's not oftentimes necessary in those cases. Like um most ponds are put and take fisheries in communities that I see or there are simple you know native fish populations that do pretty well it's really the uh the data is really needs to lean more towards why a lake is misbehaving um so but I I I do think the budget's a big thing like there's not just uh the there's no real known number of what it takes to do something like the they there's always almost always a scenario where there's a budgeting process because who how do you know like how much something's going to cost if you don't even hardly know what your problem is and on top of that you don't even have the data to tell you what the real problem is you're just seeing a symptom right so you have a whole category of these are symptoms of the problem and then there's the you take a deeper look at it and like this is the actual problem and some communities and HOAs and stuff they oftentimes are either currently in a cycle where they're just addressing symptoms or that's all their budget allows is to address the symptoms and there's not really a wrong answer to that though like sometimes addressing the symptoms is perfectly fine and acceptable and what they should do. And like a good biologist would recommend just address the symptom in this case but there are times when it's much more cost effective or uh it just it's time to address the problem head on.

SPEAKER_04 30:42

And a lot of that goes back to where are they on that timeline of that lake turning into a wetland or that lake going from behaves all the time to constantly misbehaves because uh the further you get down the road of it's constantly misbehaving the more you really need to start focusing on the problem because um symptom management won't do it right like at some point traditional management techniques of using uh herbicide or installing aeration or binding a nutrient at some point it's this isn't enough anymore um we have to go a little further and that's where um you know you have to have good communication good information to to really assess that hey guys real fast if you're a fishing guide trying to book more trips and spend less time chasing DMs you need to check out the Bloodknot app blood knot lets anglers find book and pay guides all in one place while you manage your schedule availability and clients from your phone so it's less administrative work more time for you on the water more trips booked if guiding is your business blood knot is a no-brainer best part is it's free to use extremely easy check out the blood knot app at the link below now back to the episode I like this term behave and misbehave you're one of the only guys I've ever heard use that in that way and for our non-biologists our anglers that are listening today describe to me um like if you walked out on the shoreline and you saw one that was misbehaving what would it look like?

SPEAKER_02 32:16

Yeah so I think I'm relatively grounded to what true misbehavior is versus a lot of folks maybe um they see something as misbehaving and they're but it's really just inconvenient to what their desire is right and there's a there's reality thereof is this natural is this what's always going to naturally happen in general um a part of a natural cycle or is there truly too much of something here to where it's not working out and so a lot of times harmful alga blooms right cienobacteria uh blue green algae that is uh easy this lake is misbehaving uh there is a bit of a misconception out there and you know I was at one point part of this misconception I'm sure uh as I was um learning you know say 15 years ago about blue green algae but um blue green algae is very natural uh you should always have some level some there should be some quantity of blue green algae in a population like it's it's unrealistic and and likely unhealthy for it to have absolute zero blue green algae in a system you just don't want dense numbers or dense quantities of blue green algae and you don't want that kind of monoculture um tendency that it has right it it has the ability to create an environment or take advantage of the environment to where it becomes dominant and when you have 60 70% blue green algae presence uh that's that's very unhealthy. But if it's you know five 10% I would say it's it's it's much more likely natural and normal. And so but if you can visibly see the blue green algae in the water I would say you're you're starting to look at an imbalance um but again there's kind of and we can touch on this more but uh lakes are in cycles right there's a cycle where in you guys have all seen it with like zebra mussels a lake will go with a perfect beautiful bloom thriving um forage base uh certain species of forage and even predator fish and then zebra mussels come in and the water clears up and then the entire dynamics within the food web change and then the actual the fish species in the ecosystem as well start you know um you know moving around and jocking around for position and um and then the zebra mussels will go away in some cases and then it's right kind of back but you can have that same scenario with any species of vegetation almost right and zebra mussels is easy it's kind of like that smoking gun of oh they're here typically people view it as a problem but then at the same time vegetation comes in and it could be for the same duration of time it could be it's just a cycle these plants are going to be here and then something's gonna happen and they won't be here anymore. But um it's like the world's on fire because they're here today and they're just the environment's right for them to grow they're capitalizing and so as a biologist part of it is just kind of assessing is is there something that's that we can influence that would shift this and if so you know at what cost and is it is it worth it and like because because what we oftentimes lack is um we we lack we lack the ability to truly drive what comes next in some cases right we can address what we're seeing but if we're taking a pro an approach that nature almost decides what fills the void once this thing that's filling the void is no longer here. And so when it comes to when I look at a lake for excess you know what does that look like it it really comes back to if we were to get rid of this what would come back at what speed and um is that going to be worse than what we have now and a lot of times although that kind of sounds vague or or nonspecific but like it's it's one of those things where if things are choked out probably something's not ideal right but like if it's hydrilla for example like what what are your options right you can put in grass carp and they can potentially eat everything uh you can use herbicides selective herbicides and kind of get some natives to come back right and so it comes comes down to why is the hydrilla really taking over in that in that scenario so um in in some cases you have nutrient issues in some cases it's just a a new species to the area that's running running wide open and it's like a pendulum swinging back and forth a little bit and the ecosystem has to find balance and uh yeah herbicides can help but um I'm not sure if I specifically answered what I see but I'd say harmful algal blooms are the biggest ones and filament is algae.

SPEAKER_03 36:59

So no you you nailed it you nailed it easily and this is uh you and I are cut from the exact same cloth. It is so funny whenever I hear you talk because one of the things I teach my staff first is you go to a client you start assessing what do they have and then I want you to ask yourself at every single thing you see what if you did nothing what if you just kept your hands out of it what would happen to the fishery and when you can start answering that if I do nothing question then you inherently know the if I do something answer as well. And whenever you start understanding that you don't have to react to everything it is a cycle it is a balance that's the secret.

SPEAKER_02 37:46

Yeah yeah that is a secret and I would say because um and I've learned this the hard way so many times as an overconfident younger guy um you know a decade or two ago it it really matters how you spend your time and your money on these projects like it is so important and so many clients just check the box or they do something with such a narrow vision or such a lack of understanding of the full picture. You know it's not really even they had tunnel vision as much as they just didn't understand the full scope and full breadth of everything they're working on. But uh and I actually see this a lot and I'll I I I create a lot of enemies on accident with these types of conversations sometimes but like artificial cover is a good example. If you can put an artificial cover very cost effectively or you can do it in a way where you don't like either one it's the most important thing that needs to be done or two you don't at all distract any of your finances that you're going to use to manage that fishery and still get that artificial cover in the water perfectly great perfectly fine but in my career I oftentimes look back on projects of what could I do better even if they're thriving success and almost always on poor allocation of money spending it on things that either at that time didn't need money spent on or in general didn't need money spent on right and and there's uh there's certain things where you can stretch your dollar you can get the result you can actually get better results with more consistency because um nature's gonna throw curveballs at you and you have to have you got to have reserves to handle that you got to have um the flexibility in your plan if you go in right away and you spend all this money on a bunch of stuff you spend 80% of your budget on these things that seem important and then you know the evolution or the the the changes happen naturally over the course of a few years and the system dynamics change and then next thing you know it's like oh we have these new priorities but you spent all your money on old priorities that turned out to not really be the priority they just they felt good at the time and somehow artificial cover kind of falls into that that doesn't mean it's a bad use of money as much as just don't just don't jump off the deep end right away and spend half your budget on it when um it might not move the needle as much as you're thinking like um and and we can dive into kind of what moves the needle more at some point if you'd like but it's uh yeah it's so important to to take that perspective of what if I did nothing and what is because you have to be able to predict the future right right you have to be able to walk up to a lake and see the the present the past and the future and obviously you need to talk to some folks to see the past but once you do see the past through through dialogue and and some data right sediment data in particular can tell you a bunch about the past um and then you have your current data like if you can't predict the future yet you really shouldn't spend too much money you know you got to know where you're going. And what I mean by that is like sometimes the watershed is uh not not too out of balance to where like things behave. Other times the watershed's a big part of the problem um sometimes the water body's characteristics you're just gonna be fighting an uphill battle right going back to sustainable like you you you have to have a sustainable approach and that's how you spend money wisely as a city or as an hoa.

SPEAKER_03 41:20

Speaking of the city I think uh our audience will send Bailey a ton of questions if I don't go back to the hydrilla comment you know hydrilla is one of those plants that creates the monoculture a lot like cyanobacteria and it is one especially in the Northeast um well even throughout the southeast um where historically we've spent a lot of money to control hydrilla how do you approach some of these conversations with a city that that maybe has an emerging hydrilla problem for the first time um and then conversely one that's had hydrilla for 20 years and is still trying to manage it. How do you approach those conversations Dave?

SPEAKER_02 42:02

Yeah so I would start with the the water depth and the system itself like you have to have there's no general answer I can give that's perfect although we can cover a few different angles here which will touch on everybody's needs probably but water depth is important and natural water clarity as well like when you have a lot of vegetation growing in a system the water will clear up in general like because those plants are utilizing nutrients that otherwise would be used by plankton and so hydrilla in in some of these systems can grow in 20 plus feet of water right and even like um in the southeast I've seen hydrilla growing in and not even at high elevation like mountain lakes we're talking coastal plain lakes you know um maybe elevation not true coastal plain but elevation 100 feet above sea level or something and um they're 20 30 foot deep lake and completely choked out big old like lake uh 100 acre 200 300 acre lake completely choked out with hydrilla maybe 30 acre open hole in the middle of of no vegetation and so in those situations um you probably have to take a little bit of a different approach because it's growing in all of the water depth so you'd start with a treat treat you'd treat the plants um what a lot of folks end up doing though in that scenario is they'll put grass carp in 10 15 per acre and then um they end up if they don't have a a good understanding of their nutrient load and they don't address that in the process they'll end up creating just this blue green algae kind of monocultural blue green algae instead right so it it goes from completely choked out hydrola to completely choked out blue green algae which um both are not good like both have negative impacts right but going back to it like if if you have the water if you have water that's not providing too much clarity like because not all water bodies will Will have clear water to 20 feet. Like a lot won't. And so you have to really decide if I let this hydrilla run its course, what percent coverage is it going to be? And some large public water bodies, if you let it run its full course, it still won't be more than 1% coverage. But like, can we cope with that? Can we live with that? And um, because to treat on those systems, like why is it only one or five percent coverage? It's because the lake's deep. The cost to just continually burn this stuff back and give it a haircut, or even systemically kill it. It's really um, it's something you got to weigh out. And uh the direction I've actually been going a lot uh over the last four years, in particular, kind of um, which we've talked a little bit about um offline previously, but uh using things like grass carp, fish like grass carp to control the plants and then driving all those nutrients into the food web so that we maintain um a healthy plankton population, right? And so uh historically, you know, even going back five years in the US, we couldn't do that. You couldn't you couldn't put grass carp in to control a species like hydrilla without completely eradicating all vegetation from a lake. Uh and then on top of that, you oftentimes replace it with harmful algal blooms. Um, and although stocking grass carp in systems to control hydrilla doesn't change the fact that you are eradicating the habitat, um, we at least now have an option where you can replace it with 20-inch, 30-inch secchi visibility with absolutely pristine, diverse, favorable large zooplankton and favorable phytoplankton. And it's just kind of a bit of a game changer. And so when you do that, and if you do it strategically, you create an environment where the fishery thrives, the ecosystem thrives, and then habitat, more native natural habitat, can kind of come in over time into that environment. But uh the tubers and torionza hydrilla, as you guys know, I mean, they're lasting, right? Uh seven plus years in systems. So chasing after it with herbicides, where you're killing these plants, it's a dense mat of plants, sinks to the bottom, it sucks the oxygen out of the room down there. You create all the sediment oxygen demand. Uh, and then on top of that, um, the seed bank or the root, the root bank there can come back for years, even up to a decade, likely. And uh it's just a bit of a puts you in a bind. It's like, what are we gonna do here? And so uh I would say it goes back to how broken is it, right? And if you're kind of broken, just barely, you use the herbicides, you knock things back. The further you go down the road, if this lake is truly struggling, it's easier to justify a larger reset and actually take a more um native approach to it. Uh, the the reason I I don't start with a native approach on all projects is uh you have to justify the expense, right? And um so it's hard to justify the expense if the problem's not significant.

SPEAKER_04 47:31

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SPEAKER_03 48:06

That's great. That's a great example there. Um and you kind of you kind of teed it off a little bit of your your management advancing over time. And of course, you know, you and I are friends. I know a little bit about what you're currently doing. Um, but it it seems like as you've moved through the process of like chasing the trophies, doing the research, leading the team, really evaluating the best processes, you've came to the point now in your career where you look at these systems different, different than anybody that I know of. And I'm gonna just give you a broad question here, and you take it how you want. How are we managing our fisheries incorrectly?

SPEAKER_01 48:54

We, as in uh who's who's we?

SPEAKER_03 48:57

The private sector or everybody across the board. We if we think about um if we think about the public sector, fisheries management started in traditional fisheries management, started to escalate in the 50s and 60s because that's when the majority of our reservoirs were built. If we think about the pond management community, uh that was a little bit later, that was in the early 80s that that really started. So one of them's a 60-year industry, one of them's a 40-year industry. Beasley, it's basically like if 40 years ago we got into a space shuttle and we launched the moon. And as we got to the moon, we decided we were gonna go to Mars, but we needed to change things in the space shuttle in mid-flight. So we started putting things together, and maybe we got halfway there and we realized, man, if we would have just started here doing this, uh, we could have made it already.

SPEAKER_02 49:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 49:52

Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_02 49:53

Yeah, it makes sense. I would just um the answer could be totally different, but I'll go this direction. I know it's a hot topic for a lot of folks, but uh I we're probably all in agreement, I would assume. Um the catch and release angle, I think was something we should have should have never really gone down the road we went on. And I and it's hard for me to say that with absolute certainty because I don't know the entire backstory on on all the motives originally for that direction, but I would just say, and I'm sure it was done with the best intention, like so many things, but uh overcoming the the harvest or inability or lack of desire to harvest mentality. I've been doing it now for 20 years, and every year the stage gets bigger of the people I'm convincing to start harvest, a harvesting program. But it is like it's part of their DNA, and somehow we have ingrained in the DNA of all of our anglers, and I'm generalizing, and even non-anglers, that harvesting is bad, and that is one thing, and you know, from a lake management side of things, my answer will be different, and maybe we'll touch on that. But like from a true angler, you know, fisheries management perspective, I I can I can take a fishery and figure out every single way we're gonna fail. And I can then identify which six or ten apply or three to that particular water body for that season or that year, and we can keep our eye on those details and with near 100% certainty, we can successfully accomplish our goals. You can never 100% because nature will burn you, you know, through drought and flooding and stuff, but um, in general, we can identify things, and and the one thing that constantly is is looming on every single project in general, uh aside from all female fisheries, is will we actually harvest enough fish? And can I rely on the anglers to harvest enough fish? And in almost all cases, it's not this this blind trust, like there needs to be this validation or verification process, like it um and it's it's just it's very difficult, like it's very difficult to convince people to start harvesting. So I I would throw that out there.

SPEAKER_03 52:18

Um, and then I don't know, maybe get your take and we can talk about a few other things if you'd like, but I think that this is a common reoccurring theme of the real biology segment on Sirius English. I'm sure uh it's it comes up every episode, and from the agency perspective, at this point for some species, for some species we still get great harvest, crappie, even channel cat, walleye, probably over harvest. But then there's these black bass species, and for some reason we've given them this status that that truthfully almost across the country, state regulation bag limits are useless. They are not a tool that can manipulate a population any longer for black bass. So it it wasn't exactly where I thought we were going, but whenever I think about that spaceship we're building, yeah, for some reason we lobbed one of the wrenches out the window and said, we will never need this one again. We will never use this tool. And we did it, and we didn't realize we didn't realize that was a really bad move.

SPEAKER_02 53:31

Well, and it at the time maybe it wasn't bad though, right? And that's where I don't know the exact uh I don't know the context of when it started, but it might have been over harvesting, right?

SPEAKER_03 53:39

Maybe there's a scenario where we were over harvesting or something, you know, and again certainly in the 1920s and 30s, um, we over harvested bass. And then then through the US fish and wildlife stocking efforts, we spread, we expanded the bass uh across the US. And then as tournaments became more popular, we did see an increase in harvest again. And so so there was some utilization of the catch and and release with with tournaments, that was essential. But releasing all catch, we we maybe just took it too far.

SPEAKER_02 54:16

Right, yeah, no, I would agree. And um, but uh the needs and you know, culture almost it's changed, right? So our culture's changed, society's changed some, and our our how we use these water bodies changes. So I think that's really logical. You know, going to your the other side of the coin, which maybe the direction you maybe were thinking I would go at first, but um I I would say on the private side of things, um, we are a little bit more symptom-based approach, right? We we have gravitated into a comfort zone of controlling, you know, addressing symptoms and not the real problem. Um, and a lot of that I actually tie back to a lack of good cost-effective solutions to address the problem. But uh it's it's hard to tell what what led us to this point because if we weren't looking for it, maybe that's why the innovation wasn't there quick enough or soon enough, right? And um, I I do think we're a little bit um vulnerable to just almost having like this fad type rhythm that we get in where we something's important and then uh now we're on to something else, right? And I feel like I've seen that in my career uh from herbicides to phosphorus binding and and a few other things that lead us down this path of we think we're addressing the problem because I I went down this this path myself where, and I'm sure I preached it from the rooftops, you know, a decade or more ago, of you know, phosphorus is the problem. And now, you know, in the last few years, I've come to realize phosphorus is also a symptom of a problem. And so it was like it's just like peeling the layers of this onion back where you know you could first say, hey, this algae growth or this plant growth is the problem. And then you might say, Oh, we have uh, you know, nutrients that are causing it. And now it's like, oh, it and it's it's just like this this scenario where now it's clear as day that sediment auction demand and chemical auction demand in the bottom of these systems is the real problem. And it it won't, I don't believe, um, I don't believe this is something where in 10 more years we'll go, oh no, a sediment auction demand is just a symptom of this other thing. I I do think we finally got to the root cause, but man, it's been my entire career to get there. And it took a lot of innovation um from a lot of individuals to kind of tease all that out. And and I would say some folks probably knew that answer a long time ago, you know, maybe even before I was born, but we actually now have tools to address it. And um oftentimes we hear about tools that are available. So um sometimes we almost are I would say we almost are convinced and educated in a way to do something because uh not because uh there's other ways to do it, it's just this is the only way to do it. And so that's all we know. So we have our own little tunnel vision of this is how you do it, and um it's just we're we're kind of gone down the wrong path there. And so it's not that we've done anything wrong as managers or um as biologists and as a society from that perspective. It's just we need the willingness to change now that we know things to be a little different and we have tools we didn't have before. And I think it you can't possibly say we 40 years ago should have predicted this invention that's now available or this science that's new, but how slow we are to adopt it and to get exposure to it and maybe um take the time to learn about things that we never took the time to learn about, I think that is where we have actually screwed up. Um, and that's human nature though. We like our comfort zone, we like kind of things to stay the same. Right.

SPEAKER_03 58:07

You meant you mentioned sediment oxygen demand and chemical oxygen demand, and this is the first time our audience has heard those two terms. Um can you to an angler describe to me what sediment oxygen demand is, but but give me a visual. What does it look like whenever it's misbehaving?

SPEAKER_02 58:29

Yeah, perfect. So a lot of folks I think know that uh and they've heard this term internal load, right? Where these lakes, um, it's not just, and it was once thought to be, at least by myself um or um a lot of folks, that a lot of the issues are coming from outside the lake, from the watershed. Could be farms, it could be, you know, grass is being fertilized, a lot of sources, right? Nutrients come into the lake. We gotta we gotta have a buffer, we gotta have clean water coming into the lake. Well, um, that's certainly true. We definitely don't want a bunch of polluted water entering the lakes, but over time, the nutrients and organics accumulate in the sediments in the lake. And we've all experienced it where the bottom of the lake is just mucky. It's just like knee deep, thigh deep, waist, whatever, you know, over your head of muck, and it's this soft, gooey, kind of slimy material. And um, it's accumulating. And what that is in general, um it's it's a lot of organic matter that's failing to decompose. And so when we look at our sediments, um we have sand, we have clay, and we have silt in our sediments, right? That's a lot of the things that we're looking at. Uh the silt component is the organic load. And so that's what oftentimes expresses us a cell expresses itself in that muck that's accumulating. Well, if you had that same organic matter that's at the bottom of the lake and you put it in your backyard in a compost pile, it would break down. Like nature would decompose it. There'd be all these earthworms and organisms in there that you could visually see. But if you take a handful of this this organic matter at the bottom of the lakes and you look at it, like a lot of times it's void of life, right? So if you just took a handful of this, it's oftentimes like this black, earthy looking, uh soupy muck. Um, it's oftentimes very void of life because it's void of oxygen. And all those organics, they're they're available for the food web to decompose, right? You have bacteria um and invertebrates that can decompose that material. But if there's no oxygen, they can't live there and decompose it well. And then we're just stuck with these anaerobic bacteria and um less favorable organisms that can survive in that low oxygen environment. And so when we're looking at this sediment oxygen demand, it's really just this accumulation of organics down there. And if you were to take a handful of it, it would be uh, and it was truly organic material. It's 60% carbon and say 30% oxygen, right? Somewhere between 85 and 95%, it's just carbon and oxygen, basic building blocks for all the plankton in the food web that can all turn into fish biomass. And so all that muck can the organic component of it can transfer into your largemouth bass or whatever fish you want to grow. And it's just stuck there, though. And until you have enough oxygen there, it won't decompose and it accumulates faster than it's decomposing. And so that is that sediment oxygen demand, and it actually is like self-fulfilling. The more it's um more is present, the more likely it's gonna continue to keep in that cycle it's in.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:45

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SPEAKER_03 1:02:15

And so if we balance that or reverse that equation and get it to where chemical oxygen band sediment oxygen is uh higher, like the oxygen present is higher than the demand, then you de-age a lake.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:33

Yeah, yeah, basically deutrefy, right? You say you're rewinding the hands of time in some ways, like if you want to think of it that way. Um, you you can drive those organics into the food web. Uh, the way that would look uh from a perspective of going back to is the lake behaving or misbehaving, think of it as your oxygen levels are, and this is I'm just generalizing, but your oxygen levels are somewhat static. You have so much oxygen. And when your sediment oxygen demand accumulates, and eventually you hit a tipping point where the supply-demand mismatch. And so if you can pull your sediment oxygen demand down to where your supply of oxygen is then sufficient enough for things to stay in balance, that's when, oh, the lake's behaving, right? You're the balance between the available oxygen and the demand for oxygen in general. Um, and there's a lot of science we could talk about some other time, you know, on a different show or something. But there's there's a reason why when things go hypoxic, which is low oxygen or anoxic, uh, no oxygen, like things um, things start misbehaving and you start this negative feedback loop. And so, yeah, once we solve for those organics, enough of them, a lake can behave just like any water body you currently fish on or go or you're you're related to that that you can relate to that behaves well. It's very likely if the lake is behaving well, there's a balance there. If it's misbehaving, there's a misbalance imbalance, and that imbalance ties right back to sediment auction demand in almost all cases.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:02

Yeah, and this goes from farm pond to HOA City up to Okeechobee. Doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:08

Okeechobee is a perfect example of um internal load is and and so if you think about it from this perspective, if if you have um phosphorus in your water, right? So say a hundred parts per billion, which is a lot of phosphorus in your water in a lot of areas, um, there's a thousand times that in your sediment, five hundred times easily in your sediment. And so uh the your water, which is expressing itself in this lake that's misbehaving, the pro that's the tip of the iceberg. The real problem, like you can you can treat those plants, you can bind that in-water phosphorus. It's a rounding error to what's really going on in that system. And it's um when a lake is truly misbehaving and truly broken. You know, if you're more towards the lake behaves, then yeah, those treating the algae and binding the phosphorus start making a lot more sense. Um, and it's not that they ever stop making sense, it's just at some point you might need to do more.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:05

I love it. Bailey, is this too much science for you, brother?

SPEAKER_04 1:05:09

Uh it's a lot of big words, but uh it's either way, it's very good to be tuning into, though. I can I could say that. And it's it's definitely one like David just hit on. I think it's gonna take a part two to get David back on here and really start diving into some of the nitty-gritties of this stuff. But that's why we always have the the posing the questions from the cons uh the fans and the people listening in. Is if if you're like me and you're the average Joe Angler listening to this and you're like, wait a second, what what language are you speaking, David? Uh put put your questions in there for for a part two. But this is the understanding though of it of one of the the phosphorus stuff. Uh that on top of, I mean, there's so many more topics I want to run down if we had more time, but that is the understanding of it. That is that is wicked cool. This is, I think, the reason why Steve was very anxious to get. You on the show, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:01

I was ready to to bring the world Dave Beasley because you know, in in our circle, he's he's a celebrity, he's he's one of the guys. Uh, but it to the angling community, a lot of anglers haven't met you yet, David. And I feel like you are walking this path that over the next decade it's gonna it's gonna change. Anglers are gonna go from who's David Beasley and what is he talking about, to do y'all realize that on Sirius Angler Podcast, I learned about this a decade ago, and this is the guy that's fixing these public bodies of water and making fishing across the country the best it's ever been.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:44

Yeah, no, that's exciting to me too. And it's a good vision, and it's not, you know, it's a group effort. There's a lot of folks on that journey, but I would say building out that vision and dream of solving for the catch and release challenge while also driving these organics into higher levels of the food web to where we're actually harvesting those nutrients from that system through active harvesting of fish that should come out of that lake, anyways, and creating a food web that's so lush and vibrant that those remaining predator fish in that system can meet their genetic potential in an environment that's relatively stress-free to where they actually can meet it. So they have the food, they have the reduced stress, and um they have less competition. But less competition doesn't mean catch rates have to be terrible. I mean, I have projects, one of my first projects, going back to those gratifying stories uh you you asked for earlier, is uh the the 85-acre lake, it's a fishing club in Virginia I started working on in 2010. And we uh we took their size class structure in these aren't great sizes, right? But it's um one in five fish was less than 15 inches when you go fishing. So you would catch um you would catch like two fish an hour. No, no, 1.2 fish an hour. So it's kind of slow catch rate, right? Anglers were catching 1.2 fish an hour, uh, but only one fish was over 15 inches. And then uh within three years of a harvesting strategy, catch rates went down um by 20. And so an angler would catch one less fish in an outing or something, but the size class structure went to over 50% of the fish were over that 15-inch mark, and a lot of the fish were into the five-pound range, like they were catching more trophies than ever. And um, it was this mindset of if we took half the fish out of the lake, well, our catch rates will go down half percent. But we took half the fish out of the lake and the catch rates went down 20%. There was plenty of fish there to satisfy the anglers. There just were too many fish there for those remaining fish to grow, right? And so, like, you can suppress numbers without impacting catch rates to some degree. And and I'm not saying it's that's a sample size of one and it's a unique example private club, but like this whole notion that harvesting fish is going to lead to anglers having much worse experiences, it's simply not true, in my experience. Like, it's a hundred percent false. Like, especially if you manage the habitat properly and congregate those fish better than ever, you can have half the number of fish, and if they're all congregated better, you have higher catch rates. Um, and then it just comes down to matching your predator numbers to the angling pressure, right? Because and you see that on lakes that they go from 13,000 acres down to 4,000 acres, and all of a sudden, you know, there's too much pressure on that system, right? That that they're overfishing it. So um it's fun though. I mean, there's definitely something there, the vision is there. We're gonna improve these fisheries um from a health perspective, from an aesthetics perspective, and from an angling perspective.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:54

I don't know a single angler that would rather have a couple more fish caught. Like if you told me, hey, you're gonna catch two, three less fish today, but all your fish are gonna be bigger. I don't know a single angler that wouldn't go against that. Like, like, oh, more of my fish are just gonna be big. Yeah, where do I sign? Like, that's just I don't know a single angler.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:15

It takes work though. Harvesting those fish is a lot of work, and it takes the fun out of fishing if not everyone's bought into it, right? So if you so you have a 500-acre lake, like yeah, four or five, six guys or anglers could could manipulate that fishery, but harvesting four thousand fish a year, it's a lot of work, you know, a thousand fish a person. But you know, if you spread that out over 40 people, it starts becoming more manageable and more fun and more sustainable, right? And so, um, and 4,000 that that happens to be one fishery in Florida I manage that um you know each lake it's different. Um, but I would say you need everyone bought in. You and I say everyone more than the minority, yeah. But you can get there with the minority. If the minority is willing to put in the hard work for two, three, four years, fishing will get better and people will start buying into okay, you're not breaking it, and then they all buy in. But these leaders, like these early adopters, they're everything, and they have good voices, but even with their their voice, they still, it's like if my grandfather who's passed away taught me this one thing, and it's the only thing I'm holding on to my entire life that he taught me, and now I'm learning that it's wrong, like it's it's it's just hard to break that cycle. Um, people don't do it, they don't want to do it.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:32

Steve?

SPEAKER_03 1:11:34

We gotta have a part two. It's just we're gonna have to, David. You've brought you've brought uh a lot of knowledge, a lot of truth to this podcast, and I think it's great because we're gonna leave the audience wanting more. Um, but I will have to get you back on the schedule.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:50

Sounds good. No, happy to do it. And um, I'm a student too, though, right? I'm always learning. So um I definitely look forward to kind of continuing to see where the vision's right and how we need to adjust. And that's where some of the folks in the audience, even with uh from the public side, breaking into the public side, like it's great to say, oh, we're gonna clean up Lake O or clean up you know Utah Lake, or you pick any large broken water body, and the anglers and the public are all gonna benefit from it, but like it takes a lot of partnerships, it takes a very data, you know, focused approach from a lot of folks, and um, it's not easy. And the money it's not regularly or readily available currently, like we have to we have to get that money allocated, and uh it's gonna be a five-year journey on some of these systems before they even start. But how can we get them started sooner? How do we get them to start buying into the technology and the science that will lead them to this being possible? Because without those breakthroughs, which we didn't really talk about on this session or this episode, like those breakthroughs are what's making everything possible. And uh, I look more look forward to share more on that. Heck yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:01

Yeah, we'll have in a couple weeks, we'll have uh maybe a couple months, we'll have Beasley back on. We'll talk specific examples. I know there's some uh really great research articles that have been written on some of your work as well. So we can get it like if if you love the nerd science, comment, tell Bailey, ask more questions, tell us to have Beasley back on.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:21

We'll bring back a QA for you.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:23

There you go.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:26

Awesome. Well, David, thank you so much for the time, man. It was good to uh to get on a fellow New Yorker, and we'll have to hit the water at some point. As our I say that as it's about to be August here, and it'll be August when the show's drop, and it's crazy how much the year's flying by. But uh good to get a fellow New Yorker on and uh get some learning in with you, man.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:44

Yeah, well, thanks for having me and looking forward to it.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:47

All right, folks, and that's gonna do it for today's episode of Mr. David Beasley. And like we mentioned at the start and obviously during the episode, we're gonna need a part two. So you'll you guys can look forward to David coming back on the show. Uh, and if there's any questions you guys have stemming off of that or different questions that maybe we didn't talk about that you'd like to hear David answer, uh, just like we've been mentioning before, send us an email, comment down below. We'll actually include uh David's email in the description as well if you want to ask him yourself. Uh, but if you have a question you'd like us to ask him on the show, feel free to drop us a line and we'll include that in a future QA when the next time we get David back here on Sirius Angler.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:24

Absolutely. You follow the tether of what David was putting together there. Um he's he's came up with a solution for solving oxygen demand at sediment and he said it was carbon and and that that carbon could be brought back into the water column, fed back into the food chain, create fish, and if we solve the oxygen demand issue in the sediment, and we start working towards this change of harvest mentality that you can fix oxygen demand, making lakes younger again, and make more biomass of fish to pull and harvest more fish so it all works. And man, that's that's a big undertaking. I I think that David is one of the guys that's gonna make it happen. It's gonna take a lot of us coming together to make it happen. Uh, I know that you know he mentioned a couple times Okeechobee in in the episode. I know that that's his end goal. You know, he wants to start bringing Okeechobee back uh not just to where it was you know in the 90s, he wants to work on a sediment solution that Okeechobee solves for itself and makes it better than it's ever been.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:50

Yeah, and if that happens, I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of locations trying to get him to come do the same thing for their fisheries.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:57

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:58

Cool to have another New Yorker on here, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:02

Yeah, yeah. I mean, um, he's got that background. So, of course, you have questions about New York fisheries, what's going on, vegetation, any of that. Um, let's let's compile some questions. Let's have just a QA episode with David Beasley at some point. I think that would be worth our time and worth our audience's time. Um, and I look forward, man. We've got some great shows lined up. Um, David, we said we're back, you know, and and we're back. And we've got David. Uh there's a couple of others that are coming up. We are working on that California episode. Got an email from them while we were while we were doing this episode. Got an email from them starting to schedule in when we we can do that one. Um, I've got a great episode lined up talking about uh the National Fish Habitat Partnership, and it's gonna be with an executive from a non-endemic company that's involved, uh, one of the big ones, one of the Fortune 500 companies. And he's gonna come in and talk a little bit about what National Fish Habitat Partnership is and the anniversary. But you know, Bailey and I, we're gonna hit him with all the questions on uh what the fishing industry can do. So we've got a couple banger episodes coming up. David was just the start of that, but we'll circle back to him as soon as we get those questions in the hopper. We'll circle back to him.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:24

Absolutely. Well, Steve, always a pleasure, my friend. And uh pal.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:31

All right, folks. Appreciate you, and we'll see you on the next one.