WTT Blog - Tagged with experiment

I have to admit, the topic of this research really floats my boat (as you may have noticed from the latest Salmo Science Spot)…. I spent several years trying to convince people that perched at the top of the Loch Ness food web was not an elusive plesiosaur but something much, much more sexy. Ferox! So I’m really pleased that the newly doctored Martin Hughes has taken time out to precis his completed PhD, but it does mean I’ll have to review the WTT ferox pages with his new findings.

The brown trout, Salmo trutta, is an incredibly diverse species. Individuals from the same population can adopt completely different life history strategies, which are often given vernacular names. For example, some S. trutta remain in small freshwater streams their entire lives; these are referred to as resident trout. Others migrate into large rivers or lakes to complete their life cycle and retain the name brown trout, but some that migrate into estuarine waters are referred to as slob trout and others that fully migrate into marine waters before returning to natal streams to spawn are called sea trout. One relatively understudied life history is that of ferox trout. ‘Ferox’ which is Latin for ‘Fierce’ is aptly used for these large piscivorous trout which can grow to large size (14kg UK record) and are exceptionally long lived (23 years oldest UK record- reports of 39 years old in Norway). Their impressive growth potential and life span combined with their rarity and near mythical status only adds to the allure to both anglers and scientists alike.

Typical! Not two weeks after completing my round-up for the Science Spot in Salmo trutta, the annual glossy WTT publication that our members receive, an interesting paper on IMWs (Intensively Monitored Watersheds) lands on my desk. While not exactly on topic, it includes interesting snippets that would have embellished my article. However, as I wrote in the Salmo piece, the means by which knowledge is transferred nowadays means: I can (and have already) tweeted about this paper (but not included any precis or personal view of its content); I can (here, now) blog about it and impart some detail; or I can sit on it for 12 months and tell you all about it in the 2017 issue of Salmo!

IMWhats? In the Pacific Northwest, a vast tract of land with a very loosely defined boundary but it’s roughly 67 times the size of Wales if you’re interested in that sort of thing, there are at least 17 IMWs. They are an attempt to test the effectiveness of a broad range of stream restoration actions for increasing the freshwater production of anadromous salmon and steelhead and to better understand fish–habitat relationships. This is no mean feat, and the paper by Bennet and his colleagues reports on the lessons learned so far.

On my WTT-inspired ramblings recently, I came across a shocking sight, above. Shocking because firstly, I was expecting to see a village pond complete with a raft of local ducks bobbing around, not a barren mudscape stuck behind a defunct dam; and secondly, because I immediately started to wonder where all that accrued sediment was being washed away to….. and where it was being deposited… and might it not be being dumped upon some salmonid redds at a rather inopportune time?