When evaluating harvesting strategies, there has been much less consideration of the role of harvest selectivity and with how temperature affects population responses. I experimentally manipulated harvest selectivity, intensity and water temperature to test how these factors interacted in influencing the dynamics of a size-structured population of Daphnia magna. Metrics such as recruitment and biomass were higher in treatments with indiscriminate harvesting than in those with size-selective harvesting with increasing harvest intensity. This trend was not consistent, however, between the different temperatures tested. The effect of temperature on maturation likely drove these responses, where at 25C maturation rates were fast enough to allow recruitment to occur between harvest events, whereas at 15C slower maturation likely led to recruitment failure at higher harvest intensities. These results suggest that the impacts of harvest selectivity scale with harvesting intensity, and that harvesting policies should account for this and the modifying effects of temperature.