news/editorial

8 May 2016 News/Editorial

After by far the best week of the 2016 spring, with over 200 salmon being caught (and therefore the most weekly salmon releases so far), I hope my correspondent will not mind if I quote just one of the reactions to what was said last week about “Fish out of Water”:

He/she e-mailed:

“Here is the article you should look at. The gallery in Trout & Salmon would be regarded as a rogues gallery in parts of N America in that removing a fish that far from the water is a criminal offence.

The trend of gillies/boatman wanting to put photographs on beat Facebook pages is not necessarily helpful. Oddly Russian guides seem more aware of the need to keep fish in the water.”

He/she sent me the reference to a 2015 paper by Messrs Cook, Lennox, Hinch and Cooke entitled “Fish out of Water; How Much Air is Too Much?” which discusses air deprivation generally for all fish, but also refers to the 2013 paper by Richard et al when it says:

“.......just 10 seconds of air exposure was determined to affect the fecundity of Atlantic Salmon Salmo salar, genetic analyses indicated that fish not air exposed produced twice as many offspring as those air exposed for up to 10 seconds, and three times as many as those air exposed for more than 10 seconds”.

In getting some of those pictures in May’s issue of Trout & Salmon, you would think that some have been out of the water for minutes, not seconds; the same is true of the pictures on most of our websites.

Heaven only knows what damage is being done to those salmon, all because of the mobile phone/selfie/instant photo culture.

Perhaps we humans should imagine being pulled about by some unknown force for 20 minutes, that force trying to pull us underwater, and then finally, when we are defeated, having our whole body held underwater for several minutes so that some foul creature of the deep can take a photo of us…..before that same foul creature, unaccountably, relents and lets us back up into the air.

It is hard to imagine the trauma, the scars, both mental and physical, that such an encounter would leave us with, but that is what many of us are doing to the salmon we catch.

“You are being anthropomorphic” I hear you cry, “these are animals, not humans”, but the “Richard et al” paper would indicate that, whereas the mental trauma for animals/salmon might be unmeasurable, there most certainly are physical ones for salmon (not just resulting lack of fecundity) when we deprive them of air.

At the risk of partisanship, if you look at the pictures on the Lees beat pages now, you will see no live salmon being LIFTED and HELD (two words which should be banned when it comes to Catch & Release) out of the water for photographing; they have all been deleted and I would strongly urge other beat pages to do likewise. Those Lees photos remaining of fish held out of the water were all dead anyway, summer/autumn fish, and there is just one left of a rod kneeling with his (alive) fish, supported mostly by the water, not by a hand stuck (as is commonly the case with the LIFTING and HOLDING procedure) in its stomach, and the salmon’s head out of the water momentarily, before being put under the water again, after no more than a second or two for the photo to be taken (see above).

If you have to take a photo of the salmon you catch, this is the model. It may not always be possible or easy, because of the bank and water conditions of where you catch your fish, in which case no photo may be possible.

We have all been guilty of LIFTING and HOLDING in the past.

It must stop………...and I hope other websites and fishing magazines will follow the US/Canadian (and it would seem Russian guides’) lead and not publish any more of these offensive LIFTING and HOLDING photos.

By starving those who do it of the oxygen of publicity, it is more likely it will become seen for what it is…….

unacceptable.

(You will also find photos here on Tweedbeats on Instagram (click on “camera” button top right of each page) of salmon left in the water, briefly on their sides, in the net before going underwater again and released, with a minimum of both human contact and exposure to the air, in marked contrast to those many “LIFT and HOLD” photos we have all become used to seeing, both here and elsewhere).