In Part 1 of this series we looked at catch-and-release best practices gleaned from Jacob Brownscombe’s recent paper in Fisheries Research(1). In the previous post we went from catching the fish through to documentation. In this post we’ll continue with a look at methods of assessing fish condition and various…
A couple of neat web based fishing resources that I’d like to share. The first one is from the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry web site called Fish ON-Line. It provides a searchable map of lakes in Ontario and lists such data as lake size and depth, fish…
Nine years ago, while visiting the Hawaiian island of Kauai, my wife, Western University Earth Sciences Professor Patricia Corcoran, and I noticed an abundance of plastic debris on some of the beaches we visited. In particular, the beaches on the east side of the island contained plastic debris ranging in…
I’ve been doing some background research on making artificial fish habitat as part of our conservation activities for our local B.A.S.S. club (Forest City Bassmasters). While sifting through some of the scientific literature I came across S.J. Cooke and D.P. Philip’s (eds.) book entitled “Centrarchid Fishes: Diversity, Biology, and Conservation.”[1]…
I recently built a Secchi disk (see link for instructions) for water clarity measurements. A Secchi disk has four quadrants painted black and white and is 20 cm (freshwater model) in diameter. The disk is lowered into the water using a line marked in feet or meters and the point…
With the spring fishing season slowly approaching, anglers across the country are starting to keep an eye on their favourite streams and rivers. A big part of river fishing success is attributed to timing – with both water too high and muddied and water too low and clear being problematic,…
In a recent post I talked about the various types of lakes based on their mixing classification. An understanding of the type of lake you are fishing on can give you a good indication of the depths where fish may be located at a particular time of year. In addition…
Fish movement is keyed to two main factors, temperature and the oxygen content of the water. Fish will seek out areas of a water-body that satisfy both of these needs. While the coldest water can hold the most oxygen (see Table 1) the cycles of a lake can dramatically alter…
One of water’s unique properties is that it is most dense or heaviest at 4° C (39° F) (Figure 1). This fact means that as the surface temperature of a lake approaches 4° C, either by warming from colder temperatures (spring) or cooling from warmer temperatures (fall), the surface water…
How old is this fish? This is a question I’ve heard asked many times and unfortunately the answer is generally not that easy to come up with. Fish, like every other living thing, will have different growth rates depending on a host of factors including: genetics, average water body temperature,…
