Quote:
Originally Posted by Beanzy
Wouldn't those be rediculous odds if salmon were back from just 20 fry stocked in '05? Or is that the 'official' number? We're lucky with around 3% from approx 40,000 fry stocked and the natural rate is thought to be around 1/2 that. I'd be surprised if there weren't trout migrating but has anyone seen a salmon yet or is that just speculation? That EA photo looks most like a seatrout as the small scales and maxilliary behind the eye seem clear enough, but I wish they'd not covered the tail & cropped the photo too, so we could see the wrist and whether the tail folded. It'll be worth one heck of a party when they get scale samples to prove a salmon. Best of luck & please sneak a few more salmon eggs into the tanks again this year. I want to stand in Wandsworth and watch a samon go by, what a day that'll be.  |
Beanzy, you're right, that
would be quite a spectacular ROI for just 20 fry - but we're hopeing that's just the icing on the cake, and it all adds to the story.
Thanks to the long-term Thames salmon reintroduction project, there should be salmon returning to the system: it's just that they never really seemed to make it back to the upper river, Kennet etc where they were expected. My pals in Devon all tell me that salmon and sea trout tend to turn left when they enter a river, and the Wandle is pretty much the first available left turn with a passable weir as you come up the Thames; and according to persistent urban myth (but no reason to disbelieve it) a kid caught a hen salmon on a worm just below the Beddington STW outfall in about 2001.
So they
may just have been there in tiny numbers all along, and now's the time when the EA want to help us prove it, and so get the Wandle classified as a salmonid river, meaning more safeguards, more funding, more benefits for salmon, trout, barbel, grayling, chub, roach, dace, riverflies, you name it. I'm up for some of that
Finally, a confession: I did crop into that photo of the Thames salmon on the Wands' site, so as to get more fish and less EA officer into the pic, but unfortunately even the original shows nothing of the tail except the very back lower tip: the fish was small and the hands were large!
Theo
Virus sorted... I think
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