Anglers set to reap the benefits of record-breaking sunny spring
With most of the UK enjoying an unusually dry and cloudless period between March and May, angling experts are forecasting a boost in fish numbers and weights.
The warm spring could be great news for fish and anglers!
“It’s the earliest spawning season we’ve ever had on the farm,”
top fish breeder Simon Scott, who co-owns VS Fisheries carp farm in West Sussex, tells us.
“By getting the spawning done early we should see some fantastic weights later in the year.”
VS Fisheries fish farm have had their earliest spawning season ever
Continuing warm and dry weather is also likely to boost stocks of smaller coarse fish species. May was the UK’s sunniest calendar month ever recorded, while meteorological spring – March, April and May – was the eighth-warmest and fifth-driest in recorded UK history.
The Met Office’s Dr Mark McCarthy tells us:
“The sunshine figures for spring would even be extremely unusual for summer, and only three summers would beat spring 2020 for sunshine hours.”
The impact on fish
Many anglers have reported earlier-than-usual spawning on lakes and rivers, and an abundance of visible fry.
“I remember, when I was young, carp often wouldn’t spawn until the end of June or the beginning of July, but now you hear of them spawning in April,” Simon continues.
“This year we had no winter to speak of at all, so the carp never went into any kind of torpor and they were ready to go as soon as it got warmer. By getting the spawning done early it gives them a longer growing season and a long run into the autumn to feed up, so we should see some fantastic weights later in the year.”
So, could continuing warm weather see fish spawn more than once? Highly unlikely in this country, according to Simon.
He said:
“Individual females will only spawn once, although males will try at any opportunity, so what you might see is different stocking batches in a lake spawning at different times – however, the individual females will only do so once.”
Male carp will try to spawn at every opportunity
The river outlook
Alan Henshaw, who leads the Environment Agency’s fish-breeding programme in Nottingham, is also carefully monitoring the effect of this lengthy sunny period.
“The first species to spawn are dace and grayling, but they are largely triggered by light levels and lengthening days at the end of February and the beginning of March, and we didn’t see much of a difference with those this year.
“We then had a break until the end of April and into May, when the roach, chub, bream and barbel spawned. We’d had a warm burst and they probably spawned a week or so before we would have expected, but it then turned cooler and there was a break in the spawning.”
Roach spawning on the Hampshire Avon
He adds:
“When you have low or normal river flows it’s good for fish recruitment. The fry have a very limited ability to swim and can be washed away from their natural food in high flows.
“Sunshine is the basis of everything, so when you get good days of sunshine you get production of algal blooms and phytoplankton, and the fry will be looking to feed on what’s eating the phytoplankton.
“Whether this is an exceptional year or not remains to be seen, but a bit of sunshine is always good. If it’s a good reproduction year you will see large numbers of fry of different species together in the margins right the way through the summer.”
Lots of fry
“I’ve seen a lot of fry in the margins of lakes this year, which is good news,” Simon adds.
“It’s a very, very long road for carp fry to survive in a natural environment, but for our native species like roach, perch, rudd and pike, the warm, sunny spring has been good news for the production of food.
“If we get a warm, dry summer, so long as it is not an extreme one with low water levels or oxygen crashes, then it gives these fry a better chance of storing up reserves and making it through their first winter. The shopping list of predators that will eat a 1cm-long fish is a lot longer than the one that will eat a 5cm fish.”
Lots of fish fry is good news!
Fishery consultant Andrew Ellis is also seeing positive signs.
“We’ve had fewer call-outs for fish mortality during spawning this year, and the fact the carp all seem to have got it out of the way early and are feeding heavily is a good sign,” he tells us.
Should we shut down for spawning carp? - Rob Hughes
There was an interesting discussion across social media recently asking whether it is acceptable for fisheries to close completely when the resident carp are spawning.
We don’t do it when the roach or tench are spawning, and we certainly don’t do it when the pike and perch are either. In fact, we often target these species when they’re at their highest weights during these periods.
Right now, we’re bang in the middle of carp spawning season and I’m sure we all agree that targeting any fish when they’re spawning is not the done thing. The truth is that they’re unlikely to feed anyway, but the risk comes during the immediate aftermath.
Many fisheries are carp orientated, and when the resident fish look like spawning, or actually start to spawn, the fishery closes, often for up to two weeks. I get that catching carp is an occupational hazard of tench and bream angling, so that might be risky, but if you’re a general coarse angler wanting to avoid carp you potentially lose your sport because something you don’t fish for needs a break.
Often as a result of numbers of anglers, and certainly as a result of financial value, carp are the dominant species in fisheries and set the benchmark for fishery practice and management. But what about matches? Spawning fish put matchmen and organisers in a precarious position.
I believe in the argument that spawning fish, whatever they are, should be left alone and also have a recovery period, but should whole lakes close down for carp?
We don’t consider shutting down for tench.