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Reasons for Barbel population decline

Graham Elliott said:
Dave
Your posts are always interesting informative and great to read.

I always thought you would be great on the TV as a chat show host. However you obviously didn't eat enough hormone riddled fish as a child to fit into this niche market.

Graham
Click to expand...

True mate....I do fire blanks now, but for an entirely different reason :eek: :D

Actually, I thought I might have more of a chance of getting on one of these breakfast time TV shows (my missus adores them all) that are all the rage now, they are all very similar and formulaic....you could swap any member of the front players from one programme to the other and vice versa, and nobody would notice the switch :D.

But importantly for my chances of becoming a presenter, every one of them has the obligatory token members of the 'minority groups'....gays, ethnic minorities and so on. So, my 'cunning plan' is this....my CV must demonstrate that I am truly a fully fledged member of a 'minority group'. so, here it is.

Without my glasses I am nearly blind, very reminiscent of Mr. Magoo. If I forget to put my denture in when I leave home, I get well meaning souls offering to direct me to the local homeless refuge. I have unfashionably long hair, which one could reasonably call 'a mullet', and a moustache that birds could nest in (and may already do, for all I know). I have a dodgy back which makes me stand a bit oddly at times, arthritic knees and hips that sometimes make popping noises...a dodgy heart that makes me wheeze a bit, and my feet have collapsed a bit (now 1.5 sizes bigger than they were), so I wear 'wide fit' hiking shoes for comfort...which would be fine, but for the fact that they make me look like a hobbit searching for the Shires. On top of that I have grown grumpy with age, irascible, and quite certain that I am always right...which is a precarious place to be for someone who is usually wrong :D

Wadaya think Graham, that lot has GOT to put me in with a chance of being rated as a 'minority group member' doesn't it? I would then be deserving of a start at least. I could well be the next 'Lorraine' :D:D:D

Cheers, Dave.
 
Graham

I fish a lot of matches north and south of London and cover a fair few venues all year round and these particular commercials don't restock I can assure.

The weights to win or frame over the past couple of season's have got out of hand and there's so many tiny Carp and Silvers coming through each season.

One of the venues as just done a netting to try and get things under control and took out 500 tiny Perch and seldom did these fish get caught in matches. Never really knew they were there.

Your be surprised the amount pellet that goes into canals. Pellet and more pellet, grounded pellet for groundbait, everything is pellet based, tons of the stuff goes in everywhere.

Some of the Barbel I've seen caught on commercials have been in tip top condition. I don't think anyone can pin point anything, there will always be a argument against a theory.
 
So there should be Tony. Although it seems that your experience highlighted seems mainly on commercials and canals etc.

Commercials not restocking. Strange IMO.

Yes perch in commercials are a great success story. They seem to have thrived. I would suggest that pellets are not their first choice of food though.

I think another point worth considering is the fact that they were pretty quick in ensuring that normally produced fish farming pellets of the type I am focussed on were promptly replaced with alledged fish friendly or bait manufacturers products often the only ones allowed being the fisheries own product. They were very quick in protecting their investment. Maybe they forsaw the problem. Money talks.

No such control so on rivers I might add

Graham
 
I am going to upset a few people now ?
If there is evidence to suggest or support that high oil pellets are causing liver damage . Then introduce a ban on there use .
Again I say if the evidence is there ? Then we as anglers surly must be responsible to put first and for most the well being of the fish we catch ?
 
Joe. I Can't add much to what you say apart from Fred Crouch and also Phil Buckingham said the same some years ago and published their views in Barbel Fisher magazines.

Didn't upset me.


Graham
 
joe eating stuff with a high fat content continuosly will damage any animals liver mate, liver being liver i cant see any reason to think conclusions would be any different with fish long term,
 
Well on a brighter note....livers recover well, and quickly, if starved of that which is damaging them (e.g. alcohol, fat...). So IF high-oil pellets ARE negatively effecting fishes' livers, then a 3 month 'abstinence' may lead to (at very least a partial) recovery.
Another good reason for maintaining the close season eh:eek:
 
This has some relevance- it's from the robustly debated barbel diet analysis thread late last year:

Angling baits and invasive crayfish as important trophic subsidies for a large cyprinid fish - Springer

It's based on quite recent fieldwork of course but does at least provide data points for the extent to which pellets feature in the barbel's diet. You wouldn't imagine gettng your numbers manifestly wrong if you chose to extrapolate from the results of this small study.

My own position on this is that I haven't got one yet because I still feel more research needs to be done and it's this sort of debate that helps shape the thinking about the focus of that research.
 
Hi men ,

The high oil pellet theory holds no water on the stretches of river me and Sue seek out , where the fish hardly see an angler , and certainly not lots of pellets / bait :confused: , but the fishing has certainly changed .


Hatter .
 
We need Ray Walton Graham.....his tenacity in making these people accountable is second to none, he doesnt go and have tea and biscuits with these people, he slams the door and bangs on their desk, thats the language they understand......metaphorically speaking of course lol
 
Hatter, does the river link to any tributary or the main river that does?

Just to reiterate, I am not saying the high oil content is the problem IMO. Just any de- sexing additives put into original baits used from the fish farming Industry. eg Elips Salips etc. .
 
Hi men ,

Graham , the stretch that springs to mind is a bit of the middle Teme that me and Sue fished for 3 seasons , quiet long , very overgrown , and we only ever see 6 other people in 3 seasons , and one season absolutly nobody . No fishing above for quiet a way , with a little club owning the water below , so rarely fished that the bailif gave us permision to fish through the length ?. Our little bags in them 3 seasons must have been so minute a quantity as to make no difference at all , but like lots of the Teme seems to have sufferd the same fate ?. Good thread though , lots of ideas coming out .

Second stretch was a longish bit of a really small midlands river that was completely effected by the release of otters into the river Leach , against the advice of the EA . The population was not large anyway , and recruitment may have been poor , but for those fished we stalked , and often never even fished for as we loved just watching them go about their everyday lives , they were eaten .


Hatter
 
Gorgeous stretch Hatt, happy days eh...and it could be lost soon I guess. You cant indefinitely keep those stretches that are hardly ever fished. IMHO.

ATVB
Terry
PS.... yeah, set Ray on the ba$tard$.
 
Hi men,

Terry , so under fished that we used to fish and leave the tackle propped against a tree in the swim we wanted to start in the next day , then pop into Worcester for a rubbish Chinese takeaway ( never found a goodun ) and sleep in the car . During the day we used to set up the cooker and leave the food etc in the middle , some of the best times of our lives .

Hatter
 
Same here Hatt..I was after a certain huge looking double that I watched for weeks. I left gear there overnight as I knew it'd never be disturbed.
Few anglers would have been mad enough to fish some of those swims anyway:)

Heaven on earth eh.
ATVB
Terry
 
I don't know the answer but shouldn't someone first establish how often barbel need to spawn successfully to maintain a sustainable population. I see talk of missing year classes, but if a fish that lays that many eggs, and lives past 25, was successful every year there would be no water in the river for barbel....... I would guess at 1 in 5 or 6 years being plenty.
 
I have done loads of research since we spoke on Sunday Graham, not wanting to give an uninformed answer. There is nowhere I can find mention of using feed to de-sex farmed fish, this would be too hit and miss.

The fish (e.g. trout, salmon and halibut) eggs are removed from females and subjected to shock by either temperature or more commonly pressure, which causes the third chromosome to be produce, hence Triploid fish. That third chromosome prevents female fish from producing viable eggs.

The aestrogen theory is viable, although the research done on the Loddon, to which you refer, showed that the sex change was only apparent within a couple of hundred yards of the sewerage outfall, any further and the levels are too low to have an impact.

I am still not sure there has been any decline in production of barbel, simply, in most cases a big time gap since the last stockings!!
 
Although there is mention of fatty food, there is still no mention of sex changing hormones in the food. Remember that document is by someone making a case to buy wild salmon and not farmed and raising potential health risks to humans
 
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