My research blog post

While in Costa Rica there was a day that we were going to fish with King. Ultimately the water was too rough and we were unable to go. However, when I stopped to think about it I realized that that we were going to go out without fishing licenses. Later I asked Ludrick and he informed me that in Costa Rica fishing licences were not required. I started to think that this would be a good topic for research. Using Google Scholar I started looking into if research had been done on this subject. Perhaps I wasn't searching correctly or using the right key words (because I am certain people have researched this), but I couldn't find any articles related to the topic of fishing license vs no fishing license on anything less than commercial. I want to know if  the everyday sport fisherman or fishing by the locals has any affect on the fish populations in a country where you were not required to have a license. Since I couldn't find anything on the topic I started to think of ways I could research this. I don't have much research experience but if I were to research this topic I would find another country that had similar fish species but that required licenses. Another country in South America or another country with the same latitude would likely have similar species. In finding a country that requires fishing licenses I could compare fish populations to that of Costa Rica. I would chose 4-5 fish species that Costa Rica and the other country had in common. Using multiple species would help eliminate the chance that the results are coincidence and help better establish any trends. By using local fisherman I could find the "honey holes" (as us fishermen call it) of each species in both countries and study the numbers and sizes found. Modern equipment, like GPS and fish finders, would certainly also be necessary. I think it would also be important to note average sizes of the catches in each species as this would help determine average ages of the fish being studied. By knowing the average ages we could determine if regulations help or hurt how many sexually mature fish are staying in the habitat to successfully breed. By studying all of these elements we could determine and compare the numbers of the two countries and see which country has a better population of each species. It would be interesting to see if the requirement of fishing license ultimately helps or hurts the populations. I think mostly this would be nice to research because I would get to fish for research. What fisherman (or fisher-woman) wouldn't like to have a job where they get to fish all day?