fredo
Active Member
Posts: 1,095
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Post by fredo on Sept 11, 2010 20:19:28 GMT
With the latest wee drop of rain doing nothing for the local rivers, it was back to sea angling again. We revisited a remote beach where we had good numbers of flatfish and some superb sport with sea trout in the spring. We expected that all the sea trout would be in freshwater by now and hoped for a few flatfish. We were surprised to get not only good sport with turbot and flounders, but also several mature sea trout between 2.5lbs and 3.75lbs. These fish had a few lice on them and were colouring up despite being in the open ocean. We also had 20+ finnock of 6-14oz that were COVERED in sea lice. I counted 57 mature lice on a 12oz fish and the picture below is of a 6oz fish that had 30 sea lice on it. I have no idea why the lice problem is so bad on the finnock, but not the mature sea trout. The beach is well away from any fish farming activity.
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Post by builnacraig on Sept 11, 2010 22:39:00 GMT
Is it do to with time of sea migrations? The finnock would have gone to sea as smolts this spring whereas the mature ones (repeat spawners) would have perhaps re-entered the sea much earlier in the year, when lice numbers coming from the farms in the se lochs would have been lower?
Pure speculation of course, probably nothing to do with fish farming!
BnC
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Post by G Ritchie on Sept 11, 2010 23:46:01 GMT
That is a lot of sea lice for a small fish, will they survive with that many on them?
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fredo
Active Member
Posts: 1,095
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Post by fredo on Sept 12, 2010 7:21:32 GMT
Some were in very poor condition and looked like they were struggling. Surprisingly, a few with a very high lice count looked/were fit, fat and healthy!
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Post by builnacraig on Sept 12, 2010 9:44:16 GMT
11 lice was considered to be threshhold level for smolts, bigger fish can stand a few more but I would think that finnock is not going to thrive at the very least
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