Now I limit my wildlife activities to catching and release fly fishing for trout and believe me the odds are greatly in the trout's favor.
I first thought you meant that your fly-fishing skills might not be equal to the trouts' wiles and then I read in the article that, after release, it gets to be even more of a challenge: the fish learn "hook avoidance". Well, at least you're getting lots of healthy fresh air.
They didn't really have much to say about "handling" short of that the length of time affected mortality, which seems pretty obvious.
As for "hook avoidance", I would postulate the opposite is true. With trout in particular, learning really is irrelevant, as they are only going to be there once, and aren't going to pass on anything they've learned to the next generation. The only long-term effect is evolutionary pressure. Under catch-and-keep, a hooked fish is a dead fish, and passes no "didn't avoid the hook" genes, and that favors the next generation to have less of that, becoming better over time at avoiding being caught. OTOH, when practicing catch-and-release, a hooked fish gets a second (and maybe third or fourth?) chance at a survival, to breed and pass on that same "didn't avoid the hook" gene to the next generation. There will be a mortally rate, which will still affect it, but C&R greatly slows the effect.
The result is that practicing C&R not only helps maintain/raise stock population and boosts breeding potential (in the presence of adequate resources for population growth of course) but also slows the population's adaptation and increase in difficulty of getting a fish to bite. IE it keeps fishing fun for the fishermen.
So C&R is a win-win for everyone really. The fish win, and so do the fishers.
