Blogs

The 25^th March marked the start of the smolt trapping on the River Frome! This is one of the busiest times of the year for the GWCT Fisheries Team.

On 10 March the GWCT Fisheries Team detected the first returning PIT-tagged adult salmon of 2022 passing the antennae on the River Frome at East Stoke.

On Saturday 12th March, GWCT's SAMARCH Fisheries Project Officer, Will Beaumont, will be leading a FREE workshop on "Identifying River Wildlife in Sydling Water".

A new paper entitled “Using Food Webs and Metabolic Theory to Monitor, Model, and Manage Atlantic Salmon—A Keystone Species Under Threat“ provides an insightful exploration of how we might combine data and theory to develop new modelling approaches to predict and manage how Atlantic salmon will respond to future changes.

At 6:13am, on the 24^th January 2022 the camera attached to our resistivity counter on the flow gauging weir on the main stem of the River Frome at East Stoke, recorded a SEAL ascending the weir.

Mike Swan commiserates over the decline in fish populations in the south country chalk streams.

I have seen the scenario many times, a lovely little bubbling brook, with a nice head of small trout, but nothing much over a few ounces in weight. The immediate response for someone who wants to improve the fishing potential is to suggest stocking with some bigger fish.

Every autumn we use PIT tags to mark juvenile salmon, which are detected at East Stoke when they go to sea as smolts and when they return as adults. 2021's first two PIT-tagged two-sea-winter salmon have been detected as they pass our floating PIT antennae: