In article , matthew walker
wrote:

I've been fishing some of my regular locations on the river Trent.

are eroding the pike stock in the Trent. This is not the odd pike,

They Take the Jacks as well, will this not affect the future of pike? Like I
have stated before this is on a large scale, they are also taking other
preditor species such as perch.

They'd need to be taking them from the entire catchment - the Trent is a big
enough system that they'll never get the lot. Whilst you might have a
temporary local shortage - it might last a few months, long enough to
deter the less persistent pikers - the very next set of big floods will move
fish around and you'll have a natural redistribution.

At the rate jacks grow this years fry are already around 6" and just
vacating the really shallow headwaters and tributaries. They are running
the gauntlet of last years fry, now over a pound in weight, who must also
move down a little into the range of the jacks that are just growing big
enough to catch on a line...

Take a look at a big (15lb+) female - pike eggs are small, she'll spawn tens
of thousands in a tiny ditch next february - only a very few females need to
survive to keep up the population.

if -everyone- fishing the river was taking fish you would probably notice a
drop in numbers but there would still be a range of fish present and a few
of them might become very big. It's not as if modern trawlers were scraping
the bottom every day.

I really do think that most fisheries are -improved- by removing a few of
the larger fish every year. Round here (Dorset) the chalk streams have
a proportion of the trout and grayling removed by anglers and regular
electrofishing sessions to remove pike. There is no shortage of pike and
some of them grow very big. Nowadays the keepers return large pike (because
they keep the jacks down) and remove as many as possible of the jacks - this
gives them the best size profile for the effort involved. If they take out
the biggest pike they know they will have a jack population explosion next
year.

Cheerio,

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