StuMac

Eel Herpes, now that's something I'd never heard of before, but I somhow doubt it's had a huge effect on eel populations, let alone cormorents!!

It could be argued that the cormorent problem is man made. We insist on filling every reservoir with rainbow trout, every puddle with hoards of carp. These waters end up contain fish populations that are far higher than anything that could be sustained naturally. The PAC are always saying the abundance of prey determins the abundance of predators, not vice versa. Well its the same with birds, places that are stuffed full of fish atract lots fish eating birds (big surpise), and once they arrive thay can damage nearby natural fish populations. There used to be about 300 pairs of cormorents roosting on Tay Rail bridge, and smaller roosts (about 15 pairs each) at L. Leven and L. Lintrathen (both rainbow trout fisheries). Now there are non on the Tay bridge, and about 300 pairs between these two lochs. In fact, in scotland, the only time I ever see significant nuimbers of cormorents inland is on commercial trout fisheries. It's also worth noting that it is *not* all doom and gloom. The Norfolk Broads are reputed to be teaming with silver fish (Charlie Bettel recons there are so many he can't get pike to take his lures), people have been posting on here about bumper catches in the Thames, the Tees is undergoing a major comback as a coarse fishery (yes I know I moaned about someone naming that river a while back). If shooting cormorents makes people feel better, then I say go ahead. Depite what the RSPB says I think it's extemely unlikely to make the slightest bit of difference. I recon it will be physically impossible to shoot enough cormorents to make the slightest dent in the population. Think of all the effort that put into controlling the numbers of pigeons, rabbits and crows.....any body noticed that these are in short supply. It would also be politically difficult as the government now has a commitement to preserve biodiversity in our natural habitats. The RSPB are probably playing this card very strongly (I would). Repeated wholesale slaughters of wild birds become very difficult to justify when their aim is to preserve artificially fisheries. The reason why cormorents are such a 'problem' is that, like most sea birds, they are long lived (20 - 30 years). To keep the population stable, a pair of birds has to produce two chicks over that time. In that time they may actually lay over 100 eggs, so you have a 98% failure rate built into the system. Shooting adult birds simply means it becomes easier for the survivors to rear more chicks to make up the difference. Read the pike cul leaflet that's often talked about on here, and mentally substitute the word 'cormorent' - much of it applies. The fact that birds are so long lived also means that smashing eggs (often cited as a more humane alternative to culling) will only work if yiou smash a *lot* of eggs for a seriously long time. A lot of studies about egg smashing were done when a colony of kitiwake gulls established itself in the middle of Sunderland for some reason (Late 60s early 70s). They caused mess and nuissance, and there was a huge 'egg smashing' programme. The experinece there is that people stop smashing eggs a long time before it's had any effect on the population. (Council gets fed up of spending money etc etc etc). If people are not happy with natural fisheries and want to live in a country full of commercials , which is probably the only way people in the most debsely populated partys of the country can fish, then they will have to live with cormorents and ongoing, butv totally inneffective, cormorent culs.

Minnows??

The ruffe issue has been debated endlessley but, for what it's worth..... I can't see anyone using them as a live bait either *but*, when I was a boy and used to livebait, if I'd have caught a ruffe whilst bait fishing it would have gone into the bucket with the rest. It also would have been the last bait I'd used, which means the chances of it going back in the water alive were quite high. Populations of ruffe have appeared in waters frequented by pike anglers, and many of these are a long way outside the species normal distibution so it is hard to see how they could have got there apart from in the back of someones' van. Having said that, ruffe have made it acrioss the North atrlantic and into the Great Lakes with no assistance from pike anglers. There is something odd about ruffe which lets them colonise new waters very effectively. There are all sorts of coarse fish swimming aoround lomond that weren't there 30 years ago, but as far as I know none have reached the numbers achieved by ruffe. I've seen photos of several bucketloads of ruffe taken in a single sweep of a net rowed out from the shore. Literally 20 - 30 lb of the little sods. This may sound dramatic, but I've also seen similar numbers of small perch. I have personally helped haul nets on Northumbrian reservoirs that have had 30 - 40 lb of perch in a single sweep. If you knew the right spot, you could have probably done the same on Lomond in the 1960s. Ruffe seem to've taken over the biological niche occupied by small perch. What I find odd is that I used to fish a lot in waters that had natural populations of ruffe (in Holland), and my experience was that they were pretty scarce. Certainly nowhere near as prolific as perch or roach. Why they're populations should rocket when they get into new waters is beyond me. [ 30. June 2005, 05:49 PM: Message edited by: StuMac ]

Seagull??? Do you mean a two stroke??? Surely they must have been banned on the broads by now. All that nasty poluting oil going into the water - think what it's doing to the pike (and carp) ;-).

The reason why this test site for a proposed attempt at extermination is interesting. The wild crayfish is virtually extinct in this river, so no matter what happens, it's difficult to see how the situation could be made worse!! I've seen John Wilson trapping crayfish on TV - did he have a licence??

Bizarre though it may sound - in chemical terms the concentration of oxygen in fully aerated water is the same as in the air above it. What is important is the 'partial pressure' which is about 160 mmHg at sea level. In a fast flowing stream (where the water is fully aerated), the partial pressure of oxgygen will be the same as in the air. The problem is that oxygen diffuses through water a lot more slowly than it does through air, which is why you can have areas of a pond or river that are de-oxygenated. This means that fish's gills must have water constantly flowing over them to extract sufficient oxygen to survive. The gills consist of lots of very fine filaments and, when these are out of the water, they clump together and so their effective surface are is reduced. This prevents them from extracting oxygen from the air. Some fish (lung fish, mudskippers can survive out of water because the can abosrb oxygen from other surfaces - the roof of the mouth I seem to remember. The slow rate at which oxygen diffuses through water is also why we drown if immersed in sea water (there are other reasons why we die in freshwater - filling your lungs with freshwater is a lot more lethal than filling them with sea water). When the lungs fill with water, the oxygen is removed from it by diffusion, but oxygen can't diffuse down into the lungs fast enough to allow the supply to be maintained, so you die of suffocation. There are some sythetic liquids which allow huge rates of oxygen diffusion, so you don't drown if immersed in them. I believe they are experimenting with using them to deliver Oxygen to the lungs of premature babies.

I thought people (particularly Pete Waller) might like these images. They come from the web site of the angling club of The Hague where there's a big campaign to improve the quality of the water in the city. This is largely to improve the quality of the angling, which is regarded as a perfectly normal activity over there. The images are pretty self explanatory although the captions are all in Dutch. One shows a poor city water and the bar along the bottom gives an impression of the likely fish population. The other is suppose to what the same canal will be like once the council's scheme is completed. I used to live in Holland, and it's amazing top live in a place where anglers interests are taken so seriously! [ 15. February 2005, 05:26 PM: Message edited by: StuMac ]

The point is that you are still taking biomass out of the sea, and effectively removing the bottom of the food chain. Harvesting a sensible number of wild fish from a well run and well poilced fishery removes less biomass from the sea than running a fish farm to produce the same number of cultured fish. Humanity has never farmed carnivores for the simple reason that it just isn't an effective way to feed youself. Fish farming can work - go to south east asia and you'll see fish farms all over the place. The diference is they grow carp.

I like left hand wind for fresh water fishing, but when I tried a left had wind for sea fishing (from a boat) I hated it!! It's hard to describe, but if you're using a bigger rod and winching heavy gear (and hopefully a huge cod) up from the depths it just seems more natural to suport the rod with your left hand above the real hand and wind with your right. If you're lure fishing / float trolling you're always winding the line back towards you it seems more natural to hold the rod below the reel with your right hand and wind with your left. I also find freshwater game fishermen often prefer RH wind, even with a fixed spool reel. Strnage!

I am sorry I now see that you are perfectly correct!

I don't doubt your concerns are genuine, and that what you say is true, but the last club newsletter that was sent to me said that clearly that there was a growing problem with poaching and bankside damage. It is widely accepted that naming waters on the internet or in the angling press is bad news for the fishing in the long run. This topic has been done to death on just about every message board there is. I don't head down that way too often, but I greatly enjoy the fishing when I do, particularly as the stretches I fish were pretty poor fishing (to put it mildly) when I was a lad.

Brian Did you *have* to mention the river T*** by name??? I fish it too when I'm down south seeing my folks. Whilst a lot of what you say is true, the the river is not totally dominated by match fishing interests and there are some very pleasent b stretches where you can pike fish to your hearts content and never see another angler, let alone a gaggle of pike killing match anglers. However, there are other problems, and one is the growing number of people who hear there are big pike in the river, turn up and fish without joining any of the clubs. Mentioning big fish venues on the web is a good way to attract these types and make sure your fishing is well and truely stuffed for good. What then happens is they leave litter, damage fences, cut down trees for fires, and (most amazing of all) start to dig out the bank so that they can get their bedchairs etc, set up properly!! If you are in the same club as me you will recognise this last point - the banks in question are actually a flood defence which makes this even more unbelievable! When faced with this sort of vandalism many land owners just say stuff it, and stop leasing the rights and put up no fishing signs all over the place. It has happened on several lochs up here. Please think about editing your post!

I don't know why pike anglers get the blame for Ruffe either, although I'm sure a few must have been taken North in aerated tanks when the pike fishing boom took off. In fact the otherwise excellent book I mentioned above does state that Ruffe are used as bait! I seem to remember reading somewhere that sticking corks onto Ruffe was an accepted method of catching pike / haveing fun at a fish's expense in years gone by (18th - 19th centuaries). The cork made them bouyant and so pike would see them on the surface and go for them. The alternative name for Ruffe was the pope, and I think this was an expression of anti-catholic feeling rather than serious angling! Ruffe have clearly spread since 1972 when the last major survey of British fish distributions was published. Lomond is not alone - loads have appeared in Bala Lake (is that spelled OK) in wales as well as in the lake district. In 1972 they had a very similar distribution to silver bream and spined loach, fish that are still confined to the UK rivers that used to connect directly to the european river systems. [ 14. December 2004, 05:09 PM: Message edited by: StuMac ]

Nile perch are a good example of stocking gone wrong. They were introduced into L. Victorai some time this centuary (they didn't come right upstream) and have had a very serious effect on local telapia populations. These fish provided most of the protein in the local diet, and so, whilst nile perch have supplied a local sport fishing industry, they have also contributed to a big incidence of malnutrition amongst the locals not involved in it!

And my point is that it's not true - the Lomond Ruffe population is geographically very isolated and they are undoubtedly a species that has been introduced to the Loch within the past 30 years or so. I agree that it's very hard to see how they could have been introduced by pike anglers, but someone did it. This is not a natural event. Ruffe spread very easily - they have even managed to get to the Great Lakes in USA / Canada (not indeginous to USA), where they are breeding like fury. Carried in ships ballast people think. The introduced fish population that gets me are the bullheads in the small river that flows through Edinburgh (I can't remember its name). Thousands of the buggers have appeared over the last 30 years and they are no where else in Scotland. How did that happen. Pike anglers are not to blame there I'm sure. The barbel story doesn't ring true either, although I don't dispute that they were caught red handed. Some garden cernters apparently sell small barbel as pond fish, so it could be that some ********s thought that this would be a good source of live bait for their next trip North. Did the guys have no pike fishing gear with them?? You just have to see the mess that some pike anglers leave on the banks to realise that they have no appreciation of nature.

Leon The idea that Ruffe have not been introduced into Lomond is complete rubbish. Buy yourself a copy of the excellent 'British Freshwater fish: The species and their distibution' (just publihed and a superb book, every angler interested in fish biology should get one) and just look at the distribution of Ruffe. The Lomond population is very isolated. The Loch has been studied extensively for years and people do know what fish species are there. I've even heard people say there aren't many ruffe - which is rubbish. They are at plague proportions in some areas. In parts of the loch a small net rowed out from the shore will haul in several bucket loads of them at a single sweep. These fish were not there before pike angling became popular. There are also established populations of Dace and Chub, which were not there 20 years ago. I used to subscribe to 'non introduction' theories, but people who have worked at Rowedennan actually showed me some of the data and some photos of caught ruffe. The numbers are amazing. I agree that it is very unlikely that pike anglers would use ruffe as a bait, but when I used to live bait (as a lad in Holland) every small fish I caught went into the bait bucket. Mainly small roach and perch, but if I had caught a ruffe that would have gone in too. It would also have been the last bait I used and so would, almost certainly, have been tipped back into the canal at the end of the day. There could well be other routes of colonisation, I always wonder about freshwater cruisers However, they got there, there is something strange about the biology of ruffe that means that just a few individulas establish populations very quickly. I don't know what it is, but to suggest that there are natural populations of ruffe waiting to jump into L. Lomond is just plain wrong.

As should zander....how many people obey that law??

The river Endrick is stuffed with them. That's probably where the ones from Lomond go for a day out.

The pike weighed 22 lbs, so I wouldn't mind getting the bigger fish!!!

Is this what we're talking about?? Caught this fish a couple of years back and often wondered about the mark. Fish seemed healthy otherwise edit note: fixed the picture link for you. Newt [ 07. October 2004, 05:27 PM: Message edited by: Newt ]

An interesting article! Whereabouts in Holland were you? I used to live in the Hague, which is built on very sandy soil. In places it's hardly soil at all - more like dirty sand - and there were relatively few worms!

I'm surprised it's as little as that. If the leads weigh 4 oz, and if every angler looses 10 a season then there are only ((100 x 2,240)/.25)/10 anglers in the UK = just under 90,000!

I think EA rules prohibit Zander being returned to certain rivers (Severn, Avon??). Matt Hayes was filmed fishing one of them, and returning Zander. Should he be prosecuted??

I think an important point is that the citizens of some counties seem to take unusually great delight in killing each other. Guns are fairly easy to get hold of in most Scandinavian countries, in Canada and in New Zealand as well as some Western European counties. Non of these places have a fraction of the murder rate of the US. Other places with equally liberal laws include some of the most dangerous places in the world, russia (highest murder rate in the world now I think, nearly 5 times US rate), South Africa, the Phillipines, Columbia and several carabean counties noted for incrediblely high levels of violent crime. What applies in one society does not apply to others. In fact the US is only about the 5th / 6th most violent nation on earth now. Most Eastern European counties have well and truely overtaken them. I also find that few US citizens realise just how violent a place they live in. No Western Eurpean country would tolerate the level of violence that is regarded as normal in most large US cities. Last time I was in Baltimore there was basiaclly one person killed most nights of the week, with 5 or 6 on Fridays and saturdays when people whoop it up a bit. I think its pretty much the same in any major US city.