TALES FROM THE RIVERBANK Hard facts would also seem to bear this out. Knee-jerk reaction
A compulsory catch and release scheme would not boost salmon numbers on our rivers
WORDS JON GIBB
tions. I was reminded of this recently when I heard about a petition that is shortly to be submitted to the Scottish Government. River Tay ghillie Jock Monteith has raised a
I
petition on the website
Change.org that asks Holyrood to introduce legislation to make catch and release of all wild salmon caught by anglers in Scotland compulsory. Within days the story had made it on to the pages of many national broadsheets and set the internet forums alight. But is it actually realistic, or indeed desirable,
to ask fishermen to release every single fish that they catch? There are 80,000-100,000 salmon caught on Scottish rivers every year, of which 85 per cent are already released unharmed, with around 20,000 killed each year. Monteith argues that the release of these extra fish ‘will increase stock levels due to geometric progres- sion over the next five to 15 years’. I wish it were that simple. The truth is that it
only takes so many spawning salmon to fill the available habitat in a river with juvenile fish; the real bottleneck to survival of the species occurs in the marine phase due to oceanic warming. Studies have shown that the juvenile smolt output of many Scottish rivers has not declined significantly, but that the marine survival rate at which these smolts return as spawning adults has declined from over 35 per cent in the 1970s to less than 5 per cent in the past decade. Putting back more spawning adults into a river will not change this fact one iota and, in most circumstances, will not bring about the boost to returns that the petition seeks.
f I’ve learnt one thing in a career managing fisheries for Atlantic salmon then it’s that complex problems rarely have simple solu-
‘A simplistic knee-jerk reaction to the worrying decline in wild salmon numbers is not the answer’
Look, for instance, at the famous spring fishery on the Aberdeenshire Dee. For over ten years now there has been a local byelaw requiring virtually 100 per cent catch and release of all spring salmon. Yet the spring fishing on the Dee has continued its steep decline and is now a pale imitation of its former glory days. Further south on the Tay – ironically, on the very river that Monteith works – the princi- ple of catch and release has been much slower to take hold. Nevertheless, the spring fishing there over the past two seasons has broken all recent records. Don’t get me wrong – without doubt the
management tool of catch and release has a place. When catches are so low that there are not enough salmon to fill the headwater gravels with eggs then it makes sense to maximise the possible number of spawning fish. Indeed, this is exactly what happened on many West Coast rivers in the 1990s when the unchecked expansion of aquaculture near river mouths had a devastating effect on returning salmon and sea trout. Voluntary catch and release was brought in and slowly but surely the returns on most rivers started a partial recovery (aided by a more enlightened approach to fish-farm management in recent years). Somewhat surprisingly, the chairman of the
North Atlantic Salmon Fund, Orri Vigfusson, has thrown his weight behind the petition. I wonder if he has read the small print, though. The petition states that all salmon caught ‘by rod and line’ would be returned. I wonder if the famous Icelandic conservationist, best known for his buyouts of salmon netting stations around the North Atlantic, will be happy when he learns that Scottish netsmen would still be allowed to kill their harvest of fish – espe- cially as it has just been announced that netting stations around the coast took over 25,000 salmon last season, an astronomical 50 per cent increase over the previous year. It is clear that a simplistic knee-jerk reaction
FIELD
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to the worrying decline in wild salmon numbers is not the answer. Apart from playing directly into the hands of the burgeoning anti-blood- sports lobby, a compulsory catch and release policy will not have the desired effect in the recovery of the species. Anglers themselves, in spite of taking the occasional fish ‘for the pot’, are the best conservationists of salmon. They are part of the solution, not the problem. In spite of widespread media coverage, when
I last looked the petition only had 450 signa- tories. Scottish ministers will hopefully take notice that this is hardly a resounding vote of confidence in a well-intentioned but misguided proposal.
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