Hi

This topic was brought to my attention by another poster on a different thread so I put it here instead of hijacking the other thread.

Those of you who have seen the information on Hughs fish fight programme regarding the ratio of wild sea fish species that are being heavily fished to produce feed for the fish farming industry, the ratio is 3 to 1, ie for example 3 tonnes of wild sea fish need to be taken to produce 1 tonne of farmed fish in this case it was Salmon for humans, I would guess the ratio is similar for Trout. Now when you add the fuel needed to catch, process, and distribute the finished pellet to the Trout farm then when considering the overall environmental impact, it would appear that farmed Trout are not so good for wild fish stocks or environmentally friendly. As such taking a farmed fish for the pot is a result of many other fish being taken....If a wild fish was taken occasionally from a well managed and self sustaining fishery is actually that bad???.....I have always considered taking wild fish was not agreeable to myself, but now I think about it, all that wild fish has been eating is what lands and swims in its river or lake.

I do not for one second advocate that everyone starts taking wild fish, I still feel they are better off left where they are and I do not fish rivers, I had just never really thought about the implications and process that goes into producing our stocked trout......

Excuse the pun but food for thought....

Hi apologies to all.


I was flicking through some old post and have noticed that pretty much the same thread that I brought up has already been very throughly discussed at an earlier date, new to forum so didnt know.

got a link? would like to read it - was looking forward to following this thread.

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"Take not out your 'ounds on a werry windy day" Surtees.

Hi Bill..

Dont know how to do the link stuff.......To find the thread I was referring to you need to go to the general fly fishing discussion, the thread is called "fish meal production" and the date is 18-1-2011

thanks, mate.

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"Take not out your 'ounds on a werry windy day" Surtees.

Certainly farming salmon, trout, cod and other fish relying on pellet feed is unsustainable. It should not be permitted anywhere.

richard

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Who resides on the right bank of the Derbyshire Wye and is lulled to sleep each night by the mutterings of a weir, dreaming that "When the rivers and their inhabitants come first, we ALL win..."

You brought up a very good point, something i was trying to explain to our anglers as well. For example you destroy a good deal of natural environment and have big influence on for example ocean ecosystems to catch source of protein for raising trout, you pollute rivers with outflow from fish farms to raise some 1-5kg "trophy", which is then stocked in wild water, where it has negative impacts on wild fish, most probably in C&R section, where it either dies from fish damage, starvation or in flood, whatever comes first and all that damage to the environment went nowhere. And next year, we do it again. Just so that there is enough of easy to catch fish in water.

Regarding taking of wild fish, natural mortality in trout waters can go as high as 65%, normaly it is qouted between 30-65%. So very often the anglers harvest is neglegible compared to this.

In my own club we had a rule about taking either 1 brown trout or 1 graylling per fishing day for some years now (ad 3 salmonidae in general, so oters must be rainbows). Otherwise we are allowed to take 3 salmonidae per day and in the past there was no limitation for grayling or brownie. I have suggested to do that again. From very simple reason. There is no change in population of brownies and graylings, at least for brownies we could say it went down. But not becouse of anglers harvest which is more than obvious neglegible compared to other couses, for example domination of wild rainbows, and huge amounts of stockies. There are many more factors that influence wild fish populations, but anglers normaly just see their harvest. Unfortunately it is very often used to spread some fog over other facts and as excuse to hide other stuff like stocking policy and its influence or introduction of competitive species etc.

I have pasted this link before, i shall do it again. There are many more articles about this if you search for those , but this is an interview and is therefore a more interesting read:

Why Montana Went Wild

here you go bill, fish meal production

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WHEN YOU LEAVE THE RIVER, TAKE NOTHING, AND LEAVE ONLY FOOTPRINT'S!!!

THA CAN TELL A YORKSHIREMAN ,BUT THA CAN'T TELL HIM MUCH !!

I'm not arguing for or against, but where do you propose all the anglers are to fish? We don't have the amount of wild water and wild fish available per fly angler that somewhere such as New Zealand has.

Would the Derbyshire Wye support 500 fishermen descending upon it each weekend?

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Thanks for that.

After retiring, I swore that I would never read another report again. How wrong can you be. Good thing I don't sleep much at night.

bill

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"Take not out your 'ounds on a werry windy day" Surtees.