Fishing Stats Question

+Gathering affects your ability to actually reel a fish in.
This is easily tested by fishing for something high level, and then removing some gear with +Gathering until suddenly you start seeing "the fish got away".

+Perception affects your ability to catch HQ fish.
Again, this is easily tested by pulling out 100 fish, then removing some perception and puling out another 100 of the same fish to compare HQ rates.


But do these stats have any secondary effects for Fisher?

For example, I've seen mention that +Gathering affects the rate at which you catch fish. For example, if you had 200 +Gathering, you might get a bite every 15 seconds on average, but if you threw on another 50 +Gathering, you might get a bite every 12 seconds on average.

Has anyone been able to confirm or dispute this?
I know that live bait vs lures affect bite rate, but I'm finding it difficult to test the effect of +Gathering on bite rate.

I'm pretty sure Gathering affects the range/variation of fish you can catch at a pool as well as the ability. In same cases, if you're after a specific type of fish, having a high Gathering stat can actually work against you.

I don't think that's true based on the little testing I've been able to do so far.

Here's how I tested:
Use Oschon's Torch as an example. It contains level 7,8,10,12,15,17 and 50 fish that all bite on a yumizuno lure. And the level 50 fish has a unique animation so you can tell when you get a bite even if you can't pull it in.
If I put on around 20 gathering, I can pull in the 7,8,10 fish, but I get a ton of "fish got away" messages.
If I put on around 50 gathering, now I pull in 7,8,10,12,15,17 fish, but still get "fish got away" messages from Mahi catches.

If +gathering affected the range of fish that would actually bite, I should see no Mahi bites while my gathering is low, or I should see less sea cucumbers when my +gathering is high.
Correct?
I'm just not seeing that.
To me, it appears that the lure is the only factor that determines the variety of fish you can catch at a location, gathering only affects if you can pull in a catch or not, and perception affects HQ rates.


Of course the high/low level catch ratio could be changing slightly as I put on more gathering, but I would have to fish thousands of fish at that location to have a decent dataset to draw that conclusion.
I just don't have that kind of time :X

There's got to be a better way to test.