The Living North Sea study on Tweed is now making good progress.

              Sites for the listening (logging) stations at various locations down the River, that will pick up the sonar signals as the fish pass them, were arranged and were all in position by the end of April after a delay caused by a major flood. There was then a short wait for the smolt run to commence before tagging could begin and, due to the harsh winter,  this  was delayed by a couple of weeks and the first smolts were not sighted until the end of April; mid-April is their usual start.

The first batch of smolts was  tagged on the 29^th April from The Tweed Foundation’s smolt trap on the Yarrow. Tagging has to be  performed by a registered practitioner under UK Home Office Licence  and Dr Martyn Lucas of Durham University, (with whom the study's PhD is being carried out) is the leading authority on this type of work. Those smolts were released on 30^th April, having had a day to recover from the procedure, which places a tag in their body cavity. Further tagging was carried out on the Yarrow on the 7^th and 13^th May as well as the first batch from the Gala Water fish trap on the 15^th May.

Now that the tagged smolts are in the River, their  progress downstream can be tracked. The current front runner ( a tagged Sea-trout smolt) has made it downstream as far as Cornhill but there are others hot on its tail!  Some of the tagged smolts stopped on the Ettrick, at the Philiphaugh Cauld for a couple of weeks,  and this may be in response to the unseasonally low water levels. At one time, there were eight tagged fish in this impoundment at the same time. Most have now left, but interestingly, the old mill lade was the way out for several of them, which is useful to know given the plans being made for the cauld. There are also a number of fish that have not yet reached the Ettrick and the bottom of the Yarrow is being walked with the mobile detector to find these. If any have “left the river”, we need to be quite certain that this has been the case and will have to survey this area repeatedly to be sure of it.

              More tagging dates on the Gala are planned, but we already know more about smolt movements at low flows that we did before. If we are lucky, next Spring will be wet and we will be able to see the differences between wet and dry seasons for smolt migration. 

               Later in the summer adult fish will also be netted and tagged with the acoustic tags so that movement upstream can also be monitored and losses due to causes other than angling detected and quantified.

               

 

In the middle of 2009, The Tweed Foundation began a major new study on Tweed's Sea-trout stocks, under the title "Living North Sea". This is a pan-northern European project comprising 11 other scientific research partners from Scotland, England, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. With these partners in the programme, it is hoped to identify the mixed-stock fisheries around the southern North Sea that exploit Tweed Sea-trout as well as confirm and extend knowledge of the marine feeding grounds that they utilise. The long-term aim of the Living North Seas work is to set up a North Sea Sea-trout group that can oversee the management of the  species in the North Sea.