Tell carp from pike
Angling: Tell carp and pike apart from their scale patterns
Published Date: 04 December 2008
A FEW anglers, mainly those involved in fishery maintenance, are privileged to have a good idea of what numbers of fish there are in a water as a result of their activities in netting, electro-fishing and stocking.
But, just about the only way that other anglers can get an idea of what a water contains is by what they can actually spot or know are caught and this is far from being an accurate assessment.
Catching the same few individual fish time and time again, giving the impression that the water is heaving with fish when in fact it may not be at all, can cause this false impression of a fishery's stock.
Of course there are fish that bear recognisable features, like scars, but they are few and far between and, in truth, most fish look very much like one another except for their size. An obvious exception to that are carp and perhaps pike because of their scale patterns, which can be distinctive.
With both these species it makes an interesting study to keep track of just how often individual fish are caught – or not as the case may be. Some fish, it has been found, are caught frequently while others elude capture for lengthy periods.
Research into this phenomenon has been going on for some considerable number of years – ever since tagging became a viable way of keeping track of fish movements.
I recall reading that in the mid-1990s, several hundred pike were tagged and released into a Scottish loch. Something like one-third of them were caught at least once, but some of these captured fish were caught many, many times over the research period and that served to distort any conclusions about the total population of pike that might otherwise have been reached.
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Originally Posted by plugaholic
