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‘No lice, no problem’ says SOS |
A MAJOR revival of sea trout in Connemara’s top sea trout river system, the Ballynahinch & Inagh catchment, provides further proof that sea trout recover rapidly as soon as salmon farms go away, a campaign group has claimed.
According to Save Our Sea Trout (SOS) the salmon farm in Bertraghboy Bay (the estuary of the Ballynahinch system) switched from salmon to cod farming in February 2005. Cod are not susceptible to the devastating sea lice that proliferate on salmon farms and, as a result, the catches of sea trout at Ballynahinch Castle and Lough Inagh Lodge have increased sharply over the past two summers, SOS claims.
According to SOS, in 2004, when salmon farming was still active in the bay, the rod catch was just 77 small sea trout. With the farmed salmon gone by the time of the crucial spring migration period in 2005, the catch that summer increased nearly 15-fold to 1,115 young sea trout. And now, in 2006, the rod catch has jumped again to 1,292 sea trout, with some much bigger fish being taken by anglers. SOS says there was also an excellent run of over 1,500 salmon in 2006.
Patrick O’Flaherty, general manager of Ballynahinch Castle Hotel, said: “This new catch data shows just how easy it is to revive viable sea trout stocks - and the angling tourism that goes with them. There is great excitement in the area and, although we are not yet back to the catch levels before salmon farming started up, we are well on the way - and confident that we’ll get there.
“There was nothing else wrong with this relatively pristine catchment. It was just the sea lice from salmon farms that killed the young trout smolts when they migrated out through the bay,” he added.
SOS chairman Michael Kennedy welcomed the news: “We have always said ‘No lice, no problem’. This is great news from Ballynahinch. But we must now make sure this revival can continue and be repeated on all the many other devastated sea trout fisheries which still suffer from lice infestations derived from salmon farms in their estuaries."
www.fishupdate.com is published by Special Publications. Special Publications also publish FISHupdate magazine, Fish Farmer, the Fish Industry Yearbook, the Scottish Seafood Processors Federation Diary, the Fish Farmer Handbook and a range of wallplanners.
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