Absolutely. Some of those brookie streams rely on their own young for food.
The previous example of Spring creek doesnt work in my book. Certainly enough food in there to grow many fish to gigantic proportions. I dont know the reason of the size cropping there. Constant pressure? The residual mercury and whatnot from the days when it was polluted? Lord only knows but the question of the rarity of very large trout in there has always puzzled me.
They're there, but few and far between.

IMO: two factors
lack of water and cover. Only one big hog per hole and there aren't that many.
Pressure: The more times a fish is handled/caught, great chance of mortality. We all are careful, but accidents happen

I once had a fish tank with two oscars. They grew, but not huge. Then when they died, I bought another oscar, but only one. He got HUGE.

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Check and mate.

Doesnt work in this scenario, cept for the smaller brookie trickles and ponds.

John Arway wrote this in the Pa Angler.

"Our current research shows that more
of us are practicing catch and release, whether with wild
trout, stocked trout or trophy walleye, bass or muskies.
The Pennsylvania Fish 8r Boat Commission (PFBC)
staff angler use and harvest surveys conducted in 2005
and 2006 on wild trout (Aprill7 through September 3)
and stocked trout streams (first 8 weeks) throughout the
Commonwealth showed that anglers released 92.7 percent
of the wild trout and 60.1 percent of the stocked trout
that they caught."

"...This change .in the practice of catch and release got me
thinking about how many trout we are now recycling or
re-stocking back .into our streams and lakes. I did some
quick math and found that if 30 percent of the 3.2 million
trout that are stocked are harvested and 70 percent of
the stocked trout are caught and released two times each
in a season, this would amount to an angler re-stocking
program of 3.8 million trout every year. Does it .really
matter if the PFBC or the angler does the stocking? The
same trout then become available to be caught again. If we
could compare these numbers to when harvest was greater
than catch and release rates and licensed anglers numbered
over 1.2 million (850,000 today), we would most likely
find that there are more trout per licensed angler available
today than perhaps any time in our history. Think about it,
and let me know if you agree."

I am not sure I agree with these statistics but what do guys think?
Looks like an argument for reduced stocking.

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Do you actually think so? Or are you being ironic?

The native brookie streams that are stocked with hatchery trout get far more fishing pressure and harvest than unstocked brookie streams.

By the theory, these streams should have larger brookies than the unstocked streams. But do they?

Regarding the guy in NCPA that was taking as many brookies out of the stream on their family property, in hopes of getting larger brookies.

The reason that didn't work is simply that the brookies were killed at 7 inches.

Whether removing brookies would increase the growth rate at all, I'm not sure. I think the effect would be negligible.

But even if it did increase the growth rate somewhat, that would not help in their situation, because they were killing the trout when the reached 7 inches.

When you cut their heads off, that REALLY affects their growth rate.

On a stretch of small stream, if experienced anglers fish it regularly, very few, if any, brookies that reached 7 inches would remain to grow larger.

Brookies are easy to catch.

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No, I was being a wise ass again.

So are you guys saying that the premise that a super high biomass of fish in a small stream stunts the growth of fish is completely wrong?

I've been discussing this on a board for fishing in the Smokies. Many of them harvest down there. Several believe it is helpful to bringing back "larger" fish. One person said, "In a normal stream where you might have 300 trout per mile, I wouldn't advocate harvesting. In our streams we have anywhere from 3500-4500 fish per mile."

Oh crap, I forgot about that. When are you going again? I'm going down towards the end of October thanks to recent events.
Be cool to hook up down there.
My experience has shown that what you say holds sand, but only in the smaller/smallest infertile streams.
Think Falling Springs and Big Springs. Plenty small but chock full of food. Plenty of trout. Quite a few bigguns.
You fish hard enough down there in the Smokies and sooner or later instead of the smaller bows and brookies, you'll bump into one whale of a brown.

There is no doubt that you can manipulate size through harvest.

A given body of water can handle a certain biomass. The word is Biomass, not numbers.

My harvesting mid size fish, you do increase the potential sizes. This is especially true with impoundments, but also true in streams to varying degrees. But I also agree with Squaretail that streams with extremely high fertility such as Spring Creek would be much harder to manipulate through this method especially since the anglers wouldn't follow the recommendations anyway.

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In PA, and elsewhere, if you make enough effort, you can find streams that are very lightly exploited, much less than average.

And what you find on those streams does not support your theory. The fish are not stunted. What you find are more LARGE trout than usual. And the fish are in good condition. They have not over-populated.

This is true of both brook trout and browns, but especially brook trout, because brook trout are easier to catch, so more vulnerable to getting cropped off at 7 inches.

So, what's the explanation? Why don't they over-populate? The reason is that where many of trout are allowed to live long enough to grow large, these big fish control the population through cannabilism.

The spawning produces more young fish than is needed to occupy all the slots in the stream, but the excess simply gets eaten.

And the reason there are more large trout in these streams is simply that it takes years for trout to grow large, and where they are not getting harvested, their odds of reaching an advanced age are much greater.

For ages anglers have gone to great lengths to fish places where very other people fish. Hiking into the wilderness, going on horseback, flying planes and helicopters at great expense etc.

And they do this so they can find places with big fish, and lots of them. If such very lightly exploited fisheries were all over-populated by skinny, stunted fish, people wouldn't go to such efforts.

I cut my teeth on small infertile and unstocked NWPA brookie streams that were remote and very lightly exploited and have caught many big headed 5 - 6 inch trout complete with exposed gills.

You were saying?...

Why does it always have to be all or none with you?

You absolutely can manipulate a characteristic such as size through various harvesting practices. It is actually not difficult at all in an impoundment. But I do agree it would be extremely difficult in a highly fertile limestone spring creek.

But I certainly would not recommend a bunch of people on a chat board to start harvesting to improve the size because it would likely be much easier to screw it up than to improve it.