the black diver

cormorants decimating seatrout/salmon smolts???
does any body know any thing about them.are they native,how much do they eat ,what kind of damage are they doing to bait fish also.do others notice how they have multiplied.in march counted 12 in dungarvan bay in september 28 on the cunnigar sand bar at low water

cormorants decimating seatrout/salmon smolts???

hi
1 corm. needs 1k.g. food per day =750lbs per year
about 25000/30000 fry/parr per year
art/

They havent just hit salmon sea trout smolts they can now be seen regularly inland on freshwater lkes and rivers they have set up shop by my house in roscommon....... :evil:

They're Protected arn't they?

If not.... Click Click Boom. 8)

Take it easy think how many Poachers, illegal netting, taking under size fish cost the fish numbers. not to mention the legal commercial fishermen. cormorants look cool and are good indicators of where a shoal of fish are.
well that's my opinion.

Take it easy think how many Poachers, illegal netting, taking under size fish cost the fish numbers. not to mention the legal commercial fishermen. cormorants look cool and are good indicators of where a shoal of fish are.
well that's my opinion. :)

where a shole of fish were more likely

Bear in mind the raeson these birds have started making their way into inland fisheries is because the sea cannot sustain their numbers any more as it is - I wonder why that is then?

These animals and others like our "beloved" seals have probably been hunting in our oceans long before man could possible even walk upright on two legs and suddenly in the last 20 years or so they've thrown the whole life cycle of our coastal waters out of whack and NOW they're responsible for increasing depletion of fish stocks - I doubt it very very much.

They are simply animals that are and always have been part of the natural food chain/cycle. If that's the case let's start pointing the finger at bass/tope/pollack for hammering immature fish stocks who haven't had a chance to breed yet! Ridiculous.

"If not... Click, click, Boom" - C'mon gentlemen. This smacks of the same kind of attitude that wiped out huge numbers of seals off the Kerry coast last year. I don't particularly like to see one turning up when I'm fishing either but let's put the focus of our problems in the right direction here.

Liam

Don't blame the birds. They have every right to eat all the fish they can catch.

The problem, and it's not increasing bird numbers (in fact, I've seen a huge reduction in the numbers of all sea birds in my neck of the woods) is that we've taken most of the birds preferred diet. So they're eating whatever they can find. In some cases, they've had to up stakes and move - which is why some people think they're on the increase - a dangerous way of thinking. Maybe the same is true with seals.

The answer is not culling all the other fish, birds and mammals that eat fish, it's stopping the vast amount of commercial overfishing that is going on 24/7/365 almost everywhere.

Unfortunately, while most folk in this country could tell you all about the rain forests that are vanishing on the other side of the planet and name all the causative factors, most folk here just don't seem to be able to correlate decreasing catches of increasingly small fish, the lack/migration/diet changes of whales, seals, birds and even other predatory fish and so forth with excessive commercial fishing.

It's even more worrying when sea anglers seem to be missing the point - you could forgive the man in the street who isn't into angling - he's not likely to be pottering about the shore year in, year out to spot the changes.

fair enough a cormorant or seal will damage local fish stocks but a net will do much more harm. i used to see a lot more of these birds in ones or twos all over the coast wherever i went but now i only see the occasional one on its own, more likely to find big groupings of them together at certain places inland or around the coast.
i have noticed in the past two years that the number of seals on the skerries islands off portrush has increased dramatically and the fish stocks at the mark have gone down at an equal rate, a lot of people purely blame the seals but if you see some of the charter boats coming back to port over the summer months with the odd box of 'kreel bait' onboard every weekend its also contributing to the downfall of species like pollack , coalies, wrasse and pout at this mark.
so in conclusion, i think we can all agree that trawlers/nets do most of the damage to fish stocks andthat if the numbers of seals and birds in a certain area gets out of control then some kind of measure should be implimented to bring levels under control, and finally that the message of catch and release should be preached more and more to the wider angling community and if a certain mark has been taking a pounding fishing wise, that other boats etc are made aware of this and should refrain from fishing it for a while to let it recover.

fair enough a cormorant or seal will damage local fish stocks but a net will do much more harm. i used to see a lot more of these birds in ones or twos all over the coast wherever i went but now i only see the occasional one on its own

They've all flown South, and Migrated to Portafrry Phil! :lol:

Absolute Plague of them down that way, saying that, There's enough to go around down there! 8)

ive also noticed a large grouping of them at black rock between glenarm and carnlough (although its almost white now with their s**t!) and around in red bay near the ledges. i wonder is it anything to do with the fact that both places have salmon farm cages very close by ???

4 Of them Diving around the Fishermans Pier Portaferry, But if you saw the marks of pollack and coalies off that thing, you'd know why they're there...

(although its almost white now with their s**t!)

That's how it should be - it's not indicative of a problem on it's own. Having spent more hours sitting in a boat along the shore at home than some folk on here have probably spent in bed, I can remember that until about 10-15 years ago the place was full of birds. The cormorants favourite rocks (every 50 yards or so - for miles) for drying out on looked like they'd been whitewashed. The cliffs were full of gulls - there wasn't a ledge that didn't have a nest on it. There were plenty of puffins and terns etc.

There were shoals of sandeels that would take 10 minutes to pass the boat and the place was littered with them. Pollock, coaley and wrasse to a goodly size were readily available. Shoals of mackerel and, in season, herring would darken huge areas of the bay, leaving a huge slick on the water as the birds and fish fed off them.

Now, sandeels are scarce enough. The mackerel shoals are fewer and smaller. God knows where the herring are. Any wrasse found are unlikely to be bigger than your hand, pollock are a lot smaller and more scarce, as are coley. Flats of any description are so scarce as to be not worth fishing for, especially if you have chartered for the day. Cod, haddock and ling are getting very thin on the ground as well. Crab and crayfish are about fished out. Lobster stocks, like the cray, were decimated by tanglenets years ago, but lobster stocks now appear to be on the increase, thanks to a programme designed and run by the lobster fishermen.

Not surprisingly, the huge flocks of gulls are now gone. There are still gulls about, but they seem to spend more of their time elsewhere - the local dumps, doubtless. There are certainly less cormorants, definitely no puffins. Even if you never put a line in the water, you'd know from the lack of bird life that something was wrong. If they've all moved to your patch, that's just because it hasn't been hammered as flat as mine yet by the commercials. But don't worry, they'll get around to it soon enough. Just like the birds, they want fish too.

I can go back a bit further in my memory - about 20-25 years. You could have sat on the cliffs and looked down into the bay. All over the water, there would be patches of splashing as the sandeel and fry hurled themselves out of the water in sheets, chased by shoals of small pollock, coley, mackerel etc.

Spinning off the rocks, as the tide came the edible crabs moved up the rocks to feed on the mat of small mussels and a few were easily got by sticking your rod tip down to them. They were daft enough to grab on and could quickly be retrieved for a feed from the claws - the body making an excellent groundbait. You wouldn't see one these days.

I used to find this fascinating - that it was that easy to catch. If you went back just 50 years before that, I'm told that it was easily possible to fill a small boat in a short period by using a pitchfork with a bit of twine between the tines to lift the crabs off the rocks - they were that plentiful then. There was any amount of good sized fish of any species you cared to name, from salmon and sea trout down. Everything in the sea seems to have been in abundance then. Probably, 50 years before that, there was more.

But we come very quickly to accept what we have 'now' as being 'the norm'. We're apparently happy enough to get 2 or 3 fish in a session, and seem to accept that a few blanks are inevitable - even for the best anglers. Doubtless, things going the way they are, in 20 years, or 50 years, people will have the same outlook, only they'll be happy to get one fish out of 2 or 3 sessions - and a 20cm dab or whiting will be a 'good' fish off the beach. And people who are young or new to the sport will quickly assume the mindset that 'this' is how the sea is supposed to be. Concerns over the predations of dolphins on remaining fish stocks will have commercial fishermen (and some anglers) advocating a cull. It appears that the seal and bird culls were left to too late - they'd done too much damage before we wiped them out.

Ah, never happen, you think to yourself. Scaremongering, is what that is. Exaggeration. It'll never come to that.

And you could be right. Nothing, no cataclysmic event, had to happen to bring us to our present state. Just inactivity. Do nothing now, like happened 30, 40, or 50 years ago and it will come to pass. I find it difficult to understand how, given a sound historical precedent, people refuse to believe

a) what has already happened
b) what the consequences of continuing as we have are.

The birds are not the problem. Nor are the seals. Their actions are, as if we needed another, a warning. Anglers, being sitting about the coast as we do, are best placed perhaps to see this. Questioning what we see, and drawing the correct conclusions about why it should be so and then doing our best to highlight it, is all we can do for our sport.

Advocating shooting birds, seals etc to preserve dwindling fish stocks is about as dumb as if a horseracing enthusiast advocated culling cows and sheep because they eat grass too.

delighted with the response -with the indepth explanations, thanks.i think i've opened a can of worms thats more important to us as anglers than any other topic on the forum -protection.preservation/protection .

Apologies ...joining this thread a bit late ...my internets been down

The way I see it is ... the Comorants and any other Marine wildlife, fish to survive ....we on the other hand fish for sport/ pleasure.

They have the right to the fish ..not us

Just my point of view


Andy

I believe the fossil record shows giant cod, 1.5m +, in the seas going way back into prehistory. Anecdotal evidence indicates that the size of fish being caught has reduced drastically over the last 30 years or so. Wildlife predation has always been there. The industrialisation of commercial fishing is a relatively recent phenomen. Maybe the wrong species is being culled!

cormrants are SEA birds
they have done a lot of damageto my local rivers
est. number of salmon to spwan in R. colligan 500 pairs
1000 eggs per.lb
avg. 9 lb=9000 eggs per. pair of fish
= 450000 eggs layed
95% mortality in first 2 years
= 25000 fry @ 3oz. each
=1250k.g. fry/smolts produced

10 cormorants on river daily each needs 1k.g. fish per day=
3650k.g. per year
- 1250
2400
corms. are vermin on rivers do more damage than anything else
would u let a fox eat your hens?
art/

your farming the hens not farming the fish - there is no way you can say the cormorants alone are the cause of your fish depletion

too many confounding factors involving pollution sources, over fishing etc. your own personal objectivity of a salmon decline is all it is, a point sampling of the overall scenario

When smolts are released they are released into the "wild" where they take their chances along with the rest of the wildlife. I don't keep hens but if I thought my angling activities were detrimental to the balance of nature I would certainly give it up. With regard to vermin does that term only apply to wildlife that upset you?

Sorry if I'm coming across all aggressive I'm just a tad cranky at the moment. :x

Apologies ...joining this thread a bit late ...my internets been down

The way I see it is ... the Comorants and any other Marine wildlife, fish to survive ....we on the other hand fish for sport/ pleasure.

They have the right to the fish ..not us

Just my point of view


Andy

does that mean your giveing up fishing?
leave more fish in the c for cormorants
why dont we all give it up theyed have plenty to eat then