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reLAKSation no 1110

Valediction for salmon:  On the 1st February, the Rural Affairs Secretary Mairi Gougeon, joined the Provost of Kelso to officially open the River Tweed to salmon fishing for the 2023 season.  Ms Gougeon blessed the river with a few drams of Glenkinchie whisky and wished successful fishing to the anglers who came to attend the official opening.

The Rural Affairs Secretary used the occasion to launch the Scottish Government’s Wild Salmon Strategy Implementation Plan. This sets out the actions to be taken over the next five years to ensure that Scotland’s rivers have a healthy, self-sustaining populations of wild Atlantic salmon with a good conservation status.

It is therefore perverse that after launching the plan, Ms Gougeon opened the River Tweed to allow anglers to fish for the most threatened component of Scottish salmon stock – the spring salmon. Whilst current legislation prevents these fish from being killed, they can be highly stressed through catching and handling. It is also perverse that the Ms Gougeon opened this river to fishing before the official record of 2022 catches has been published. The plan is supposed to be evidence based but how can decisions be made when the evidence has not been published.

Alan Wells of Fisheries Management Scotland has welcomed the plan saying that this is an important step in protecting and restoring our wild salmon. Sadly, Dr Wells is wrong. This plan offers nothing new and will result in some tinkling about at the edges without addressing the fundamental underlying reasons why salmon are in crisis. Dr Wells says that catches of salmon in 2021 were the lowest on record since records began in 1952. This follows years of sustained declines. He adds that we must take the specific actions that the salmon need, but surely if we don’t know why these fish are in decline, how can we take actions that specifically address the declines?

The other reason why this plan is doomed to failure is that it is not directed at protecting wild salmon, but rather at protecting the interests of the wild salmon fisheries. This was apparent when the strategy was launched a year ago and is equally  apparent from the implementation plan. The plan ensures that anglers are currently not subject to any changes that may interrupt their sport.

The section on angling has six actions, the first of which is the existing process of assessing the conservation status of selected rivers. This process remains flawed as can be seen from the River Dee which has seen a continuous decline in catches over the last twenty years despite the mandatory imposition of catch and release, yet this river remains classified as a Grade One river.

A second action is to review the close time and catch and release regulations. MSS have already conducted a consultation on catch and release and the message was that anglers didn’t want mandatory catch and release so anglers can continue to kill fish if they so want.

Whilst common sense would say that there should be a single salmon season that applies across all Scotland, the likelihood of change is remote. Currently the River Spey fishing season runs from 11th February to 30th September, yet the River Tweed season that Mairi Gougeon opened is longer running from 1st February to 30th November. Why?

The other actions restate the obvious but the one about needing to refresh and promote guidance on catch and release best practice says most about the state of the wild fisheries sector today. Perhaps if the salmon fishery boards stopped posting pictures of anglers holding their salmon, then the fish might be treated with a bit more respect.

Of course, the tone of the implementation plan is not surprising given that the major influences on the strategy and the plan are from the wild fisheries sector and are effectively looking after their own interests first.

However, putting all these points to one side, what interested me most about this implementation plan is the focus on building an evidence base. The plan states that science and evidence are key to delivering many of the plan’s actions. I find that this contrasts with the Scottish Government’s approach to sea lice in which only science seems to matter, especially if it is specially selected science, and evidence appears to have no value.

Yet, the approach to evidence from the recreational angling sector leaves a great deal to be desired. Nearly all the data I have analysed over the last twelve years comes from the wild fisheries sector yet I am repeatedly told, in attempts to undermine the arguments I make, that the data is unreliable. Only last week, someone attempted to deride my work, quoting the MSS document – Status of Scottish Salmon & Sea Trout Stocks 2013 (Report 03/14) that states ‘rod catches are imprecise’. However, no thought is given as to why the rod catch data is imprecise or unreliable and how this affects decisions about wild salmon and wild salmon fisheries. It is now 10 years on since that report was published and yet the new salmon strategy offers anything to ensure that the catch data is 100% precise and reliable. What is the point in the new plan trying to focus on building an evidence base when the evidence collected is so imprecise and unreliable.

As I am more interested in trends than specific numbers, I have worked on the assumption that the imprecision and unreliability is relatively constant over the many years of data and thus is not so important, whilst for the wild fisheries sector it should be of paramount importance. Yet in my experience the wild fisheries sector and also Marine Scotland Science have done nothing when notified of significant discrepancies in the data. There just doesn’t seem to be any interest in addressing these concerns. Data collection should have been a significant part of the new implementation plan but as there is little interest in imprecision and unreliability, it is missing from the new plan.

I have previously highlighted discrepancies in catch data but will do so again here. I specifically will consider the River Tweed, since this is where the Rural Affairs Secretary opted to launch the plan. The following table shows salmon & grilse catches recorded by Marine Scotland Science in their official spreadsheet whilst the column on the right are the catches taken from the various Fisheries Management Scotland Annual Reviews,

Over the twelve years from 2010 to 2021, Fisheries Management Scotland have recorded 6,442 more salmon and grilse than appear in MSS’s official spreadsheet. This Is not an insignificant number, but no-one from MSS or the wild fisheries sector appears either interested or concerned. If such a discrepancy appeared in salmon farm data, there would be a massive outcry, with social media full of comment, perhaps even articles in mainstream newspapers. Maybe, even an MSP might ask questions in parliament, but this Is not salmon farming. It is the wild fisheries sector and thus considered to be of no interest to anyone other than anglers and if they don’t care, why should anyone else.

It will be a couple more months before the data for 2022 is published, possibly eighteen months after the first fish was caught at the beginning of the season. The new plan would have been a real opportunity to modernise the wild fisheries reporting system, but I can see no mention of this.

Following the publication of the SIWG report in which proposals were made to improve wild fish reporting alongside reports from the salmon farming sector. I can’t say that I have seen anything different since, although I did hear that MSS had recruited a consulting company to look at modern real time digital reporting of fish catches. No further details have ever been released, so I will assume that the company chosen couldn’t come up with a working system. I can imagine how much money has been spent on this and yet at the start of 2023, the current archaic system clearly remains in place.

Interestingly, this week, the Daily Record has provided a further insight into the wild fisheries sector with not unexpected news that fish numbers in the River Nith mean that strict regulations remain in place. The Nith is close to the English border on the other side of the country to the Tweed.  The Nith also has a long fishing season running from 25th February to 30th November. Unlike the Grade One River Tweed, the Nith is a Grade Three river.

According to the Daily Record, the number of permits sold to anglers has been cut by half since mandatory catch and release was introduced in 2016.  Last year, 142 permits were issued, down six on the previous year. Of these 142 anglers, only 74% (105) completed and returned the required catch forms, down from 88% the previous year (130). This means that 55 anglers over the two years did not complete the catch forms. Those who previously failed to return a form can only obtain a new permit if they pay a fine of £10.  No wonder some anglers are not that bothered with the paperwork.

The Nith is a relatively small river, but it can be seen if the same attitudes to reporting fish catches is applied to all rivers across Scotland, then it is not surprising that the data is imprecise and unreliable.

Wild salmon have been increasingly failing to return to Scottish rivers since the early 1970s. We don’t know why and its unlikely we ever will, simply because the Wild Salmon Strategy doesn’t ask the question, so no-one will therefore bother to look for any answers. Instead, the Wild Salmon Strategy follows old prejudices against everyone and anyone except the wild fisheries sector, who are of course blameless. It might be a start if they could accurately count the number of fish they catch. Maybe it’s because their abacus is broken.

 

SPILLS: I was going to write the third part of my SPILLS study in this issue of reLAKSation, but I heard that the report is to be finally published next week.

As I have previously discussed, the data (or the evidence in wild fish terms) does not support or validate the models so it will be interesting to see how MSS present the results. I wouldn’t be surprised if they say that they haven’t found the expected evidence but that this doesn’t mean it is not there.

The fact that the science is clear about the risk to salmon from sea lice has been repeatedly stressed recently. It seems that there are many experts on the science of sea lice, so I would like to put out a request for just one peer-reviewed paper that shows larval sea lice are carried by wind and currents and infest wild fish in the process. There are plenty of papers highlighting models that do this but little in the way of straightforward experimental science. There is a paper by Penston and others, but in that example, the lice are found in a river estuary rather than out at sea. With so much research invested on sea lice, surely it cannot be that difficult to provide me with details of just one paper on actual, rather than modelled sea lice dispersal.