Barbel Fishing and Populations

[Lawrence Breakspear]

Most definitely Paul, if you look at all the Thames tributaries most show a decline of various degrees in their once Barbel populations, the Barbel in the Thames are no different to those in the Severn, other than that they are truly indigenous in the Thames, which flies in the face of those that say the Barbel decline is only on rivers where they never should be, so nature re-addressing that situation.....thats rubbish to be honest. The first thing that declines, as we have seen on the Teme, is the tributaries of the mother river i.e. the Thames and the Severn, once those main populations decline, they reduce by default their own colonization instincts and dont travel and push up the tributaries as they did, so look to the Thames for the problem and whilst the Thames is producing some monster Barbel as these situations do, they will soon be gone due to repeat captures, poor handling or just old age, they don't go on for ever as they wont on other rivers....a glut of monster Barbel is very much the writing on the wall for that river, thats my opinion anyway

 

[Alex Gowney]

Paul, it's not just one species. Chub fishing on the Windrush is now a waste of time, not much better on a lot of the Cherwell either.

I'm not entirely sure all Cherwell barbel came up from the Thames due to the numbers of fish there. Surely established Cherwell or Teme fish would spawn in those rivers and so the circumstances on the rivers they flow in to (Thames/Teme) would be irrelevant to the tributary fish?

 

[Lawrence Breakspear]

Once the Barbel get into the tributaries they stay I am sure, but they still need new fish coming in to bolster the stock and push them on.....but we know on the Teme Barbel did travel up and down in times of high water, over weirs etc. I thought the Cherwell Barbel came from the Thames...

 

[Graham Elliott]

Just a note here from my observations and of my pals.

The Thames silver fish population, and also the Loddon and Kennet have increased and are on the way up.

I have had some good fishing, including 60-70lb roach and dace from the Thames, bags of 12-15lb from the Kennet and plagued by roach up to 1lb on the Loddon this summer.

When I spoke to Dear Keith Speer a couple of days before his sad death, he was telling me of bags of 40-50 roach up to 1.13 coming from Oxford town!

They are definately on the increase in my areas, and maybe that is an outcome of the Barbels decline? Just a thought.

Graham

 

[Graham Elliott]

Lawrence is spot on re the Teme and Severn.
one particular fish was caught in the Teme and the same heavy fatty caught above Pixham. Twice.

I suspect the Teme is (was)a spawning area for many of the below worcester Severn fish.

 

[Lawrence Breakspear]

Graham bang on.... when the Severn Barbel boom took hold, it was noticed that the indigenous species declined to the complaining of some anglers, the Chub was the worst affected, a then the Dace and Roach, the biggest decline however was the Bleak, but since the numbers of Barbel on the Severn have started to decline, we have seen a resurgence of other species, we now see, double figure Bream, huge Chub with 5 pounders being common place, big Perch and fabulous Roach fishing.....so another key indicator in my eyes of the steady decline of the Barbel

 

[Lawrence Breakspear]

I had a 12lb 6oz Barbel from Brokamin on the Teme, with a damaged Dorsal and one missing upper barbule, I had that same fish the following summer off the Severn at Beauchamp Court.....I couldnt beleive it

 

[Terry Simner]

She's following you Loz...heard what a nice guy you are Fallen for you...hook, line, and sinker

Re. Teme barbs...I think its a given that it'd be a lot easier for barbel living between Worcester and Tewkesbury to go up the Teme to spawn, rather that up to the gravels of the Middle Severn. But not many are making that journey now..for whatever reason.

 

[Simon Lush]

Once the Barbel get into the tributaries they stay I am sure, but they still need new fish coming in to bolster the stock and push them on.....but we know on the Teme Barbel did travel up and down in times of high water, over weirs etc. I thought the Cherwell Barbel came from the Thames...

Where various groups of Cherwell Barbel came from would be an interesting subject ! certainly not all from the Thames that is for sure !!!

 

[Paul Dowgill]

So given a few years back we were all very concerned re silver fish and cormorant predation, is this just a cyclical phenomenon? I have to agree with Alex on the Thame the chub also seem to be in decline. BTW a few years back when the Severn flooded Worcester cricket ground a member of Teme Severn told me there were no barbel when it came to netting the fish...are they more capable of dealing with high flooding? When a discussion like this starts it never ceases to surprise me how little we really know about freshwater habitats and the environmental impact on them of natural and human events.

 

[Robert Richbell]

There are 2 issues i can see, the gradual decline of most species in many rivers and the rapid decline of Barbel and chub. My feeling and fear is that we have passed the tipping point and the the combination of poaching, predation ,pollution,extraction etc have now hit home.. My belief is that had the rivers been healthy with decent fish stocks the impact of predation would not have been too significant. I used to fish for chub on the Kennet with a rod,landing net and a bit of crusty bread, flick a few bits out, wait for the chub to start taking it, sometimes in seconds then float a bit down with the hook.
As an personal observation, in spite of fewer fish and plenty of crays the chub on the Kennet, when i get 1 all seem to be quite skinny.

 

[Howard Cooke]

I do find the relationship between silver fish and barbel an interesting one. Based on the posts so far, we seem to have rivers where most species have suffered a massive decline- barbel, chub, roach all seem to have vanished. We have other rivers where a noticeable decline in barbel stocks seems to have been accompanied by an increase in silver fish. It's also interesting how you can carry around a certain notion of a rivers occupants and then be surprised by an almost chance encounter. I don't suppose many people fish the Kennet for its silver fish, I certainly don't but in August last year I decided to fish the maggot feeder. I fished 3 different swims including a large weir pool. I was inundated with dace, perch and roach it even got a bit annoying at one point (well, only a bit). The fish were of no great size but they were abundant.

If it is the case that the silver fish are returning as barbel stocks decline what is this telling us about water quality/habitat issues in those rivers. Are barbel barometers for a river's general health? Meaning that if their numbers decline we can take it that there are fundamental issues with the river because this decline points to more fundamental issues about the river's capacity to sustain life? Or perhaps barbel simply operate within much narrower tolerance parameters meaning that their decline acts as an early warning sign? That wouldn't necessairly reconcile to evidence of increases in silver fish though although we don't really know at which point in a cycle we are now accessing.

A stretch of the Kennet I fish used to be a roach syndicate. Then the barbel took over and I have spoken to many anglers who fished it in the glory days with a haul of less than 15 barbel a day being a virtual blank. Imagine how someone may have felt if they were a passionate roach angler.

The problem for me remains that we simply don't have a reference point, a benchmark by which rivers can be assessed for their general health and done so within a context that has been developed through study and science. Once you have that then a process of monitoring can take place which then allows for appropriate intervention. The difficulty there is that that benchmark could look different for rivers with quite different characteristics (Loddon v Wye).

Also, to the extent that any lobbying is required of political bodies, it can't be on a barbel only ticket. I do think we need to show that a decline in barbel numbers indicates fundamental issues for a river and potentially all of its inhabitants. From the outside, a decline in one species but something of a resurgence or bloom in another is probably simply going to make folk shrug their shoulders and then carry on reading The Lady. That said, it's clearly of much deeper concern where rivers seem to be devoid of all fish and that's probably where any analysis needs to start, together with rivers that are doing fantastically well.

 

[Alex Gowney]

Once the Barbel get into the tributaries they stay I am sure, but they still need new fish coming in to bolster the stock and push them on.....but we know on the Teme Barbel did travel up and down in times of high water, over weirs etc. I thought the Cherwell Barbel came from the Thames...

As Simon says, not all the Cherwell barbel come up from the Thames. With barbel being indigenous to the Thames it's reasonable to assume that all the Thames tributaries have their own indigenous stock also, as presumably fish have always wandered up tributaries to some degree or other. When you consider how far up the Cherwell barbel have been found, as high as Cropredy in fact, only a few miles from the source, then it's apparent that these fish have not negotiated all the weirs the river has between Oxford and Cropredy. Clearly the Cherwell was originally colonised by Thames fish but does this also apply to chub, roach, perch etc? Is the main river the source of all fish in the tributaries?

 

[Lawrence Breakspear]

The thing is Howard, without repeating myself ad nauseam, we must look to Europe for a clue, for years the Barbel has been been researched and monitored more than any any other species, or so it appears, not just one country but across the whole continent where Barbel are present and not by Phd students, by qualified freshwater biologists, everything from the Aquaculture of Barbel, the stocking of Barbel and the effects of the P.laevis parasite, and the effects of chemical and heavy metal ingestion by the Barbel and they dont do this for the pleasure of the angler, its done to monitor the health of the river and its tributaries, they stock Barbel at fingerling stage purely for monitoring purposes not so anglers can catch them later, they consider the Barbel to be a bioindicator, because they are the first to show the effects of pollution, especially the type they are monitoring, i.e. heavy metal and chemical, this is why the Barbel is the most affected species by Pomphorhynchus Laevis parasite in our rivers because its the way they feed, they burrow deep into the gravel and silt for their food stuffs, and thats where the poisons end up and this is how they can ingest heavy metals and chemicals, and the P.laevis parasite is another indicator of the presence of the heavy metal pollution and chemical pollution , they infect the shrimps the Barbel feeds on, the shrimp feed in the areas of effluent outfalls, the shrimp carries the P.laevis eggs, the Barbel eat the Shrimp, the eggs hatch in the Barbel stomach, the Parasite lives in the Barbels gut and then is excreted to start the whole cycle again....when I took part in the River Severn Barbel study in the 70's we dissected Barbel, and to see these vile parasite's spew out of the Barbel stomach was shocking, I would say that every mature Barbel in our rivers today is infected in various degrees by the parasite, the Europeans take the Barbel health very very seriously, if the Teme was in Europe, the alarm bells would have rung a decade ago....

 

[Lawrence Breakspear]

The only thing I can say Alex and Simon is look at the Teme and how that river got its Barbel, fortunately we only have to go back 30 years and we can see in our life time how Barbel colonization works, ok it may have happened with the Thames 10,000 years ago, but I still believe the mother river i.e. the Thames or the Severn would be the source of Barbel pushing on instinctively to explore other habitats whether it was a 1000 years ago or or 20 years ago.....with one proviso, that is that the mother rivers own Barbel population was not in decline, I know illegal stckings take place and are successful, you only have to see the Wye for that, but I believe that every mother river has an epicenter of breeding, that ultimately effects the whole of its tributary system with Barbel as they swim up and down to colonize, I consider the middle Severn to be the Severn's area, it doesnt mean that Barbel dont breed in these tributaries, it means they dont get that natural push from behind as fresh fish enter the system, as Barbel push other fish out I do believe they also push their own species forever on and up....

 

[Mark Swaby]

Lawrence is there any way these parasites can be killed without harming the host fish(did they not used to treat dogs with worms with liquid paraffin).I know it would have to be an ongoing treatment every time the fish was caught.

 

[Lawrence Breakspear]

I dont think so Mark, there was a train of thought that the Barbel lived with the parasite infestation and appeared to be little troubled, as did Trout and Chub to a lesser degree, but it is acknowledged that the worm can ultimately burrow through the stomach wall of the host (the Barbel)and this results in death, I would like to see a nationwide survey done regarding this parasite where Barbel from every river are checked to monitor the infestation, these fish would have to be killed, but its for the greater good ....I have wondered for some time if the parasite as somehow morphed into a more virulent and threatening life form for the Barbel and ultimately kills everyone it infects, but I am only an ordinary Barbel angler not a biologist.....who knows?

 

[Dave Taylor]

Some excellent thought provoking posts chaps.
Although we are going over old ground this has to be THE issue for most members of this forum, and despite the depressing fact that we know that barbel are not thriving in many of our catchments it is nonetheless a fascinating subject.
I wonder- with some trepidation-, just how many rivers currently support barbel of all year classes?
When I first fished the Wye 8 years ago it was refreshing to be able to catch 16 barbel from a swim ranging between 2 1/2 and 9 1/2 pounds. It reminded me of my early Royalty and Throop days many years previous.
Howard, you mention " yardsticks ", and as I previously said it depends how far we want to go back in time.
The demise of Wey barbel on some stretches reflect the degradation of habitat to which the EA are in denial. It is no coincidence that parts of the Wey that have retained some of their past glory still support reasonable stocks of barbel and chub of various sizes, whereas those that have changed for the worst have seen a distinct decline.
I have photographic evidence of this decline, and have stood with EA officials where the pics were taken (early 90s), with photos in hand to illustrate the obvious changes, all to no avail.
When I used to get seriously involved in Wey catchment affairs I would liaise and attend many site meetings with the area fishery officer who remained in that post for years and knew the river as well as me. Between us we achieved lots of positives for my clubs stretches of river.
This all changed when he moved on ( and eventually,through frustration caused by his changed remit, left the EA) . We have since had a succession of F O's who don't stick around long enough to witness any visible changes, and although polite, love to patronise. Remind me of politicians
I would look to local river trusts to highlight decline nowadays, but I know some of them feel like they're banging their heads against the wall with the EA.

 

[Lawrence Breakspear]

Not wishing to be considered a conspiracy theorist here, but be in no doubt, the EA know far more than they let on, and if we believe they are cuddly colleagues who have our interests at heart think again, the only thing they respond to is the stick, not the carrot, they must be held accountable, I mean come on.....why are they stocking Barbel all over the place, they know something isnt right......

 

[Dave Taylor]

Not wishing to be considered a conspiracy theorist here, but be in no doubt, the EA know far more than they let on, and if we believe they are cuddly colleagues who have our interests at heart think again, the only thing they respond to is the stick, not the carrot, they must be held accountable, I mean come on.....why are they stocking Barbel all over the place, they know something isnt right......

I agree Lawrence, call me a cynic if you like, but I always suspected that many Calverton barbel were stocked to upgrade the river status and therefore give a false impression of it's wellbeing!
Trouble is,that policy can cloud our perception of failing barbel populations where they have been previously stocked into unsuitable habitat.
I was led to understand that the EA are more picky where they plonk barbel nowadays. However, that must mean they have a grasp of substainable habitat, which means they should know the answers to all our questions!