News

Floating Pennywort

Floating pennywort is a highly invasive and environmentally damaging plant that spreads from fragments, grows extraordinarily quickly and can blanket a river from bank to bank. It is wreaking havoc on several southern and eastern English rivers, but it spreading north and west. It may not be a problematical plant for streamy trout water, but it will grow very vigorously wherever flow slows. This short video, from Clearwater Photography, summarises the problem and what is being done on the middle and lower Kennet, including some good footage to help identify this pernicious weed:

At WTT, we're keen to ensure that all the advice we give and practical techniquers we demonstrate are underpinned by sound science. It's Jonny Grey's role to keep us abreast of current academic thinking as our Research & Conservation Officer, and he has been passing it on to you in various formats, including the blog.

Here, he gives us an update on two projects that will hopefully bear some fruit this year, primarily because the grunt work has been taken on by two keen MSc students, Abbie & Charlotte, both from Queen Mary University of London.

Interestingly, they both also started out at University of Portsmouth in Marine Biology. To give you a bit of background:-

We are delighted that our annual Get-Together for 2018 will be visiting Gargrave, N Yorks on 19 & 20 May. A few of us will gather informally on the Friday night (18 May) in the locality (please feel free to join us if you can) before a Saturday full of varied and interesting stuff.In the morning, speakers will update us on projects by local groups, work by WTT in the patch, research on fish passes and some good old trout fishing talk.The programme is HERE. In the afternoon, we’ll walk the Aire to look at habitat improvement work, including fish passes.

Saturday daytime costs £10 to include tea, coffee & lunch, payable at the time of booking, with the form HERE. Please book by Friday 4 May 2018.

For those able to stay on, we’ll gather in Gargrave on the Saturday evening before a Sunday sampling wild trout fishing on some of Yorkshire’s fabulous and famous trout streams. If you would like to fish, please contact Christina in the WTT office by Friday 27 April 2018 to help us gauge numbers.

The deadline for the UK River Prize is fast approaching – applications close on 19 February. The UK River Prize provides the opportunity to showcase your river restoration project and receive UK-wide recognition for your work. Selected finalists will attend the UK River Prize Awards Dinner with a chance of winning the prestigious Nigel Holmes Trophy.

The River Restoration Conference theme this year is ‘River Restoration: Engaging with Rivers’ .The conference will take place 24th - 25th April 2018 at De Vere East Midlands Conference Centre, Nottingham.

The first early career researcher to bravely kick off our series of guest blogs was Jess Picken from Queen Mary University of London but based in Dorset with their River Communities team. She is studying how low flow events shape communities in salmonid rivers - see her first blog contribution, here.  

Almost a year later, and we return to the same location in Dorset but to a different Jess and a different take on chalkstream communities; this time shaped by plants. Jessica Marsh is funded by the G and K Boyes Trust and is based with the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust fisheries team. She is a conservation biologist specialising in aquatic ecosystems, with a primary research focus on enhancing knowledge of threatened populations to better inform management. 

Check out some of Jess's preliminary findings over on the WTT blog.

The Environment Agency is currently consulting on plans to increase permit charges for habitat improvement work in rivers.

Twelve months ago, such a permit cost £50; from 4 January 2017, that went up to £170 (plus a compliance charge of £70); now, even a small-scale project using a few commonly-used habitat improvement methods could face a permit charge of £1500 or more.

We believe that these proposals jeopardise the work that tens of thousands of people are doing to make our natural environment better, very often in partnership with EA and in support of the Agency’s statutory obligations.The proposals do not differentiate between work for the environmental and those seeking to gain from the environment and we would encourage individuals, clubs and community groups to respond, ahead of a closing date of Friday 26 January 2018. The WTT response in full is HERE and a brief model response HERE.

A new report, commissioned by Salmon & Trout Conservation Scotland, tells a damning story about the impacts of salmon farms on wild salmon and sea trout. The first paragraph of the abstract reads

Results from scientific studies on the impacts of salmon lice on Atlantic salmon and sea trout are summarized [here]. Considerable evidence exists that that there is a link between farm-intensive areas and the spread of salmon lice to wild Atlantic salmon and sea trout. Several studies have shown that the effects of salmon lice from fish farms on wild salmon and sea trout populations can be severe; ultimately reducing the number of adult fish due to salmon lice induced mortality, resulting in reduced stocks and reduced opportunities for fisheries. Depending on the population size, elevated salmon lice levels can also result in too few spawners to reach conservation limits.

Damning indeed. The full report is available here

Working with local groups, whether they are angling clubs or conservation volunteers, is a critical part of our work. Building skills and enthusiasm in volunteers to improve river habitat means the work carries on long after we have moved to the next project.

Slowly but surely we are improving the River Lark in Suffolk so that it supports more trout and more wildlife generally. Some of our projects on the Lark have been large scale and professional, involving WTT Conservation Officers Andy Thomas or Rob Mungovan directing large machines and just a few volunteers (see 'The Lark Sings')

The most recent project was very much volunteer led-see video below with Rob Mungovan.And read the article in the local press here.

The Environment Agency (England) make charges to review and approve applications to carry out most work in the river. This process, called Environmental Permitting, is something that WTT (and its partners such as rivers trusts and angling clubs) goes through for most projects that we deliver on a ‘main river’.

The principle of the Environmental Permitting Regulations (EPR) is good. Everyone – farmers, contractors, fishing clubs, charities - must ensure that the work that they are doing will improve the river and not cause any issues such as flooding.

However, the costs associated with this process are planned to increase substantially and will become a significant element in the types of habitat improvement projects that we deliver.  We operate with limited and fixed budgets for our projects, so in practice this means we will spend more on obtaining a permit and less on actually delivering the habitat improvement.In some cases, the cost of obtaining a permit will be prohibitive; clearly something we want to avoid.The proposed charging scheme is complex and we’re working our way through it, but, as an example, it seems that work to protect a piece of eroding bank, more than 10m in length, using brash (so-called ‘soft’ engineering) will incur a permit charge of over £1000.

You may have heard the controversy over the effect of neonicotinoids and bees.

Perhaps not surprisingly, these pesticides, which are used mainly in arable crops such as oil-seed rape, also get into our rivers and lakes and impact the fly life. There is now proof that this happening - see this article in the Guardian and more on the report instigated by BugLife, here.

Chalk is a full length documentary film about chalk streams and chalk stream fishing. It is a beautifully shot, lyrical and informative film with a great cast which features many Wild Trout Trust friends and supporters including WTT Director Shaun Leonard and WTT Founder and Vice President, Charles Rangeley-Wilson.

The documentary covers many of the highlights of the chalkstreams and their history: the revered mayfly hatch, the dry fly revolution and the 'dark art' of nymphing, the weedcut, and the manicured estates of the Rivers Test and Itchen, but also draws attention to the wilder, less well-known, rivers of Yorkshire, Norfolk and Dorset and the uncertain futures of these iconic rivers.

You can watch Chalk on the Video on Demand platform ‘FishingTV’ which allows you to rent or buy the film.

The most vulnerable stage within the life-cycle of salmonids is typically from swim-up fry through the earliest juvenile phase. Of course this is when it is also most difficult to keep track of them due to their small size. Add to that, the strategy in some populations to up-sticks and leave the natal river for the open sea... then the knowledge gap here is huge.

Thankfully, with advances in acoustic telemetry, scientists are learning more about where smolts go and at what rate. To tell us a little bit about this field, Isabel Moore from the University of Glasgow has contributed an overview of her PhD research on two sea lochs, one of which contains a fish farm. Check out her blog, here. 

Don't forget there is a wealth of information in the series of interesting contributions from Early Career Researchers, all in a readily digestible format, so please do have a trawl back through the blog pages and contact them if you have any questions.