news/editorial

18 October 2015 News/Editorial

Perceived wisdoms, commonly held beliefs are often wrong; you only have to look at the multitude of past property, stock market, dot-com and commodity booms to know that almost nobody, despite learned economists coming out of every orifice, saw the subsequent “busts” coming. They thought the sun would shine on the booms for ever, or at least that it would not stop shining…...quite yet.

If you ask the average salmon angler (let’s call him KP, no not the nut, or arguably the most talented cricketer of all time, but “Knowledgeable Piscator”), he will say that the main problems are in the sea, that smolt survival rates there are low, that we should be controlling numbers of goosanders and cormorants which eat our smolts before they even get to the sea, and that we should kill very few adult salmon (especially big hen fish) to maximise reproduction, and that netting anywhere should cease altogether.

9, maybe even 10, out of every 10 KPs would agree with this.

I am with them, including putting as many salmon as possible back, especially hen fish…..or I was.

With exception of spring salmon, because no rivers have a spawning superabundance of them, the uncomfortable truth could be that both KPs and yours truly, with respect to those rivers with an abundance of summer and autumn salmon, could be wrong, and damagingly wrong…..in some years.

The question that KPs (and I) have to answer is this……”Why is it that both 2014 and 2015 (and here I refer only to the Tweed) summer and autumn fishing have been so comparatively lacklustre?”

The salmon and grilse (summer and autumn) rod catch for 2014 was 6,030. With a fair wind, with 6 weeks still to go, 2015 will produce something similar, one hopes very much better, despite the drought conditions so far. But let us assume, for this purpose, 6,000 as the average mark for both years.

KPs will know that, on average, you look back 4 years for the parents of the grilse, and 5 years for the parents of the salmon (not the whole story, but for this purpose let’s go with it).

So most 2014 and 2015 salmon and grilse will have come from 2010 and 2011 (and 2009 and even 2012, but cut me some slack in ignoring them).

The Tweed salmon and grilse (summer and autumn) catch for 2010 was 21,774, and for 2011 it was 13,610, an average of 17,692, let’s call it 18,000 (between friends).

The 2010 catch was a record which may never be broken, but there are those who think egg deposition in 2011 would have been even greater than 2010, because the 2011 run was predominantly salmon, whereas 2010 was mainly grilse. Indeed, evidence from the catches of the Northumbrian north east drift net fishery is that the 2011 run was even bigger than 2010.

Whisper it “entre nous”, but, if pressed, the Tweed team at the time thought there could have been 250,000 to 400,000 summer and autumn spawning salmon and grilse in the Tweed at the end of both of those years.

So how is it that the product of those 2 massive years in 2010 and 2011, averaging 18,000 catch, has produced 2 comparative lemons (not that bad in absolute terms, but you know what I mean) in 2014 and 2015, hardly critical, but averaging just over 6,000?

Now we all know that rod catches are not a complete indicator of abundance, but a difference of 3 times between the parent and offspring generations is way, way too much to dismiss as the result of adverse fishing conditions.

If further proof were needed, look at 2003 when fishing conditions were even worse (ie drier) than this year. With 6 weeks to go in 2015, Ladykirk and Horncliffe, two of the principal beneficiaries of drought, have caught 225 and 162 salmon and grilse respectively; if memory serves me right, they caught over 1,200 and over 750 respectively in 2003. Two expert anglers, fishing here last week, who had been at Horncliffe and Tweedhill in 2003, recalled how one hooked 7 salmon in 7 consecutive casts and how salmon were colliding with their legs as they waded in the pools. Nothing like that is happening this year.

Now I know what most KPs will say, for they cannot blame our nets, as we have fewer now than in 2010 and 2011, and anyway we have never had netting here after 14th September.

The KP mantra will be “it’s all about survival in the sea” and some of our friends will beat the fundraising drum to do something about that, without ever saying what exactly it will be, how much it will cost, is it realistically achievable and how you would ever measure the outcomes?

The awful truth could be much closer to home and we have all been complicit in it.

Which is this.

There were too many salmon and grilse in the Tweed in 2010 and 2011 and, by putting back most of those caught, especially the big hen fish, and in the absence of any meaningful netting, we made the overpopulation and overcrowding situation worse.

In both those years, we could have killed every summer and autumn salmon and grilse we caught, and not only would that not have harmed subsequent populations one jot, it would quite possibly have improved them.

The limiting factors in such years of summer and autumn run abundance is a million miles from not having enough adult salmon to populate the spawning areas, the one thing we all obsess about and the single reason we put back so many of the salmon we catch.

The limiting factors are space and available food, and you do not need to look very far in nature to know that too many, far from being a good thing, can be counterproductive.

The juvenile salmon world is built on excess, on say 80+% of fry not making it to parr or smolt stage, “losers” as Dr Ronald Campbell calls them,……….but maybe in times of excessive excess, far too little space and extreme starvation in terms of lack of available food per juvenile, that percentage of “losers” gets critically close to 90%- 100% and even the normally naturally selected “winners” find it harder to survive?

Even in these days of medicated grit, you do not have to tell keepers of grouse moors about the deleterious effects of leaving too many adult grouse on the ground just before the winter.

We have all been conditioned to correcting the salmon situation by personal restraint and in allowing more salmon to spawn, and I cannot see any way that we will ever want to change that, and of course in years of comparative lack of abundance (such as this year and last), not killing salmon is more likely (than not) to be the right thing to do.

But in years of superabundance such as 2010 and 2011, it could be exactly the wrong thing to do.

Bar bringing back netting in years of plenty (how would you recognise years of plenty in advance, how would you know how many to kill, think of the adverse PR, who would have the skills to man the nets etc etc?) I cannot think of any way of dealing with this, we will just have to accept it as the vagaries of a truly wild resource and that there will be bonanzas and lacklustre years, as there have always been.

If there really were up to 400,000 summer and autumn salmon and grilse in both 2010 and 2011, and we had reduced that by the average rod catch of 18,000 by killing everything, and leaving 382,000 to spawn, would that really have damaged juvenile production?

Certainly not and the uncomfortable truth for all of us is that……. it could have made it better.

Of course there are other issues, smolt sea survival, predators etc etc, but the main reason, for 2014 and 2015 not being quite what we had all hoped for, just could be superabundance in the parent generation…..and that may not be a reason which many KPs have ever considered.

And to those who question why we bought off the nets here if overpopulation, as a result, was a concern (which it was)? The answer is that most of it was done to offset the excesses of the netting at sea of the 1980s (the big Tweed net buyout was in 1987) and 1990s, to protect our very few spring and early summer salmon, and to avoid the nets, which were for sale anyway, falling into the wrong hands..

The good news….that it is hard to imagine any superabundance of spawners from 2014 and 2015, and with a population of maybe 50,000+ summer and autumn salmon to spawn here, with reasonable spawning conditions, Ronald Campbell’s “losers” amongst the resulting fry might revert to a more normal figure and the “winners” will survive and prosper amid the reduced competition, as compared to those big “superabundant” years.

And, no doubt, daring to even mention all this will annoy those in whose interests it is never to mention the possibility of “plenty” or “superabundances” when talking about our salmon, especially after last year.

Ah well, these pages specialise in annoying people, it seems…...nothing new there then.