“Big fish don’t get big by being dumb,” is a favorite outdoor saying of mine, but perhaps it only exists to provide those trophy fish with a bit of anthropomorphized intellect justifying my difficulty in catching them. Whether that’s a walleye heading up to the 30-inch mark, a smallmouth bass eclipsing 20 inches, or that rare muskie that tops the tape at 50 inches, those fish have put in their time, found the haunts that keep them safe, and have picked-and-chosen the right prey season after season to keep them growing and to keep them away from an angler’s boat. Perhaps their pickiness and some innate, evolved intelligence also has something to do with it, but the reason that big fish survive is likely a combination of X factors, a bit of luck and some help along the way from conservation minded anglers.

It’s estimated that a trophy walleye, that is one hitting that 30-inch mark, can take up to 20 years to get that big. The same timeframe is applicable to a 50-inch muskie. Even a smallmouth bass takes about a decade to reach 20 inches, and the combination of the available water, aquatic habitat, and food required for all of these magic milestones for such popular sportfish starts to snowball. Add in various water types, such as rivers requiring more energy to live in, or certain lakes that are less fertile, or have different quality of food sources, or those lakes that cover hundreds of thousands of acres, versus those smaller bodies of water, and it can take even longer to attain trophy status.

Ideally, lakes and rivers remain clean and static in their water composition, clarity and quality throughout that span, or perhaps only improve with better shoreline habitat conservation measures, discharge rules or the expansion of better septic technologies and regulations over time. Impacts of aquatic nuisance species such as zebra mussels, carp, gobies and other fish can certainly change the environment and influence it for the worse during that span, however.

Food cycles go through boom-and-bust phases, with baitfish doing well one year, but not the next due to a longer winter, drier spring, cooler summer, or other environmental factor influencing how much of a particular prey item comes into being each year. Low water springs limit spawning success not only of game fish but also the baitfish they eat. Flood years can produce an abundance of forage. How many good years stack up when compared to the lean times in a trophy’s lifespan can impact how big fish can get and how fast they can do it.

If a tree falls into the water and no one is around to hear it, we might not know if it made a noise, but it likely provides habitat for bass, crappies and other species, along with serving as a start to the aquatic food chain. Rocks, rubble, reefs and other hiding places also help big fish survive, hide and feed. The more structure a lake has hidden below it or along it, the better fish often do with a dynamic system to provide cover from predators as they grow, ambush points for prey, and if we’re working the luck angle a bit in this process, a harder place for anglers and their lures to access.

That latter aspect, the number of lures that go by them each season and the size of any given lake where those lures are cast, and pressure can really limit the size of certain trophies as well. Then again, management of lakes, with slot limits and size restrictions, or perhaps those angler-enforced codes of catch-and-release and selective harvest on their own, without regulations in place, can also help skew the size of trophy fish further up the tape.

So much goes into the creation of a trophy fish. The next time you admire that whopper walleye, massive muskie or supersized smallmouth, you might attribute it to your skills as an angler overcoming the smarts that led them to their length or the wisdom that allowed them to eclipse a certain weight. However, it’s more likely that (in addition to whatever intelligence we assign to them) the quality of the water around them, the places they have to live, hide and feed, and the food nature provides them has a bit more to do with it … in our outdoors.