Jo Girvan - River Forth Fisheries Trust
We are delighted to announce that our new fish counter at the fish pass at Fankerton is now up and running. The technical difficulties we have had since the counter was installed earlier this year have been solved and we are starting to receive data on any movements through the fish pass. This information will shortly become available to view through our website and we will be providing regular updates throughout the upstream spawning migration this Autumn.
The fish pass at Fankerton has been in place for one season, which means that adult salmon could potentially have spawned upstream of the weir last winter. We carried out electrofishing at three sites upstream of the weir in August this year to see if we could find any evidence of salmon spawning, but we did not find any salmon fry. It may take some time for enough adult salmon to ascend the fish pass and produce sufficient young so that we can pick them up through electrofishing survey.
Because the area has been inaccessible for many years, there has been no salmon spawning here and it may take time for adult salmon to ascend the pass in any numbers and build a genetic homing instinct to repopulate this part of the river. The counter will help us to monitor this.
Fish counters are one of the primary mechanisms for fisheries management, providing accurate figures on the number of adults returning to a river. This type of information can help with many aspects of management such as assessing the passability of existing fish passes and accurate conservation limit setting. We hope this will be the first of many fish counters that we will be able to install on the rivers of the Forth District. Two more counters are already in the pipeline through the RiverLife: Almond & Avon Project, with plans for others to follow.
Thanks to Andy from ACE Ltd UK and Gareth from Vaki for helping resolve the technical issues.
