Individual outcomes matter in the context of responsible and sustainable catch-and-release practices in recreational fisheries and their management

Abstract Recreational anglers often engage in catch-and-release (C&R) whereby some of their catch is returned to the water (either to comply with harvest regulations or voluntarily) with the assumption that fish will survive and experience negligible impacts. Despite the assumption that C&R is usually harmless to fish and, thus, helps reduce overall fishing mortality, a large evidence base shows a proportion of released fish will not survive. Even if the event is not lethal, each individual fish will experience some sublethal impact (e.g., injury and stress). There is some debate within the recreational fisheries science and management community regarding the extent to which sublethal impacts or even mortality of individual fish matter, given that fisheries management efforts often focus on whether excessive overall mortality affects population size or quality of angling. Here, we embrace the perspective that individual-level outcomes matter in the context of responsible and sustainable C&R in recreational fisheries and their management. We outline 10 reasons why there is a need to account for individual outcomes of C&R fish to generate resilient fisheries under a changing climate and in the face of other ongoing, increasing, and future threats and stressors. Fostering better handling practices and responsible behaviors within the angling community through education will improve interactions between fish and people while ensuring more successful releases and ecological benefits across fisheries. We acknowledge that cultural norms and values underpin ethical perspectives, which vary among individuals, regions (e.g., rural vs. urban), and geopolitical jurisdictions, and that these can dictate angler behavior and management objectives as well as how individual-level C&R impacts are perceived. Our perspective complements a parallel paper (see Corsi et al., 2025) that argues that individual fish outcomes do not matter unless they create population-level impacts. Creating a forum for discussing and reflecting on alternative viewpoints is intended to help identify common ground where there is opportunity to work collectively to ensure recreational fisheries are managed responsibly and sustainably.