Report claims more diverse nymph population than 30 years ago

 

Greetings!   The recent publication of a paper with the headline ‘Significant improvement in freshwater invertebrate biodiversity in all types of English rivers over the past 30 years’ in the scientific journal Science of The Total Environment has thrown the pollution activist lobby into all sorts of a tizzy because, for all the obvious reasons, it throws a significant spanner into the doom narrative.   Wildfish, the organisation previously known as the Salmon & Trout Association, now turned river environment advocates, rushed out a press release to, I think, trash or at least seriously cast doubt on the Total Environment paper. I say I think because the Wildfish release was even more baffling than the original paper and, having read both, I can tell you that took some doing. But more of that later. First let me give you my professional take which, usefully in this context, goes back 30 years.   If you were leaning over a bridge today looking down on chalkstream in a normal month of a normal year it would not look much different to 30 years ago. Indeed, I have seen colour photographs Halford took of the river at Mottisfont Abbey which you’d be hard pushed to date as 130 years ago. But appearances are deceptive. Travel to the head of the valleys, even at the height of the wettest winter, and streams have vanished in the past 30 years thanks to excessive abstraction. These will never return; we are literally losing miles of tiny, wild streams and brooks with every passing year.

 

 

Looking over that bridge the water looks clear but we know it contains a cocktail of chemicals, agricultural, domestic and industrial that surely cannot be doing good. Indeed, you can cogently argue that the largely organic waste of Halford’s time was helpful to fish and bugs. Anyone who went sailing in the days when yachts vented waste directly into the sea will know there is nothing fish like more than s**t!   If anyone asks me what has changed most in my time on the chalkstreams it would be rising fish, or more particularly the lack thereof. Now, I cannot tell you definitively why this is. Some people point to the stocking of triploid trout, effectively a genetically modified trout. I’d go along with this except in my experience unstocked streams seem to have an equal lack of rising fish. Maybe, if the report is correct and the nymph population is on the rise, canny trout are not wasting time and effort on floating flies but rather munching away to their hearts content on the growing sub-surface population. Part of my bafflement with regard to the lack of rising fish is the hatches. Now, it is often said we lack the hatches of old but I’ve not noticed that on a scale that would stop trout looking upwards. Often, I see a river thick with flying bugs, which supports the findings in the paper, but nary a fish moves. Are they, to repurpose that old British Rail excuse, the wrong type of flies? It could well be which brings us nicely around to the meat of the Total Environment paper.   The highlights of the paper (their words not mine) are that river macroinvertebrate richness has increased throughout England over the past 30 years with a recovery of pollution sensitive invertebrates reaching the reference condition, the improvement seen across all river types. If like me you find some of the jargon unhelpful ‘macroinvertebrate’ are bugs that can be seen with the human eye and ‘reference condition’ the expected population level in normal conditions. In short, the report is saying the assumption that pollution is causing biodiversity decline should be challenged because their data, which draws on solid monitoring going back 30 years, suggests something different.

 

Mayfly larvae . Image: Dr. Julian Taffner

 

Now this is where it gets murky, and to be fair to the authors of the report, they allude to this albeit buried in the footnotes. The question is how do you measure biodiversity or as they say in the highlights, richness? For the sake of explanation let me give you examples: your sample today shows five species compared to four at a previous sampling. That is a tick the box for increased biodiversity. However, what has not been measured, and is not part of the historic dataset, is the number of individual nymphs.   So, quite feasibly, you might have a total population of a hundred nymphs today comprising of five species whereas in the past there were a thousand nymphs comprising of four species. But, by the metric of the Total Environment analysis, the former is considered a win whereas you and I might feel the latter is preferable. As they say of all statistics, it is often what is hidden that is more revealing than what is shown.   Frankly, I’m not sure this report is the real deal and the headline screams clickbait to me. These reports are essentially advertorial for researchers who will have paid the journal in the region £3,000 to secure publication. Whilst I am going to file this one under the question mark heading I leave you with a last thought. In the previous Newsletter I quoted Ernest Pain’s Fifty Years on the Test. In it he talked about the river as it flowed through a town where it divided into two channels. One channel was productive for fishing, whilst the other, which carried a majority of the town ‘waste’ rarely saw a rising fish. As I say, just a thought.

 

 

Lead me to the water  Two newsletters ago, theming the quiz randomly around the colour white, I asked a question that required the answer of progressive rock band Procol Harum.   I thought nothing more of it until an email popped into my Inbox. Did I know Peter Cockwill, manager of Dever Springs and one of our guide team used to run a tackle shop with Procol Harum frontman, Gary Brooker? Indeed, I did not and a quick call to Pete confirmed that it was indeed so.     Peter Cockwill with his wife   Pete and Gary went back over four decades first becoming friends when Pete ran a fishing syndicate in Surrey, the friendship morphing into the shop in Godalming that was called Cockwill & Brooker. But actually, that wasn’t the greatest impact Gary had on Pete’s life but rather a casual question that has sparked Pete’s wanderlust for fishing around the globe, when he was invited to join Gary on a trip to Oregon. Tongue in cheek Pete calls that the ruination of his life, an invitation that was to open up the world for a country boy who barely had a passport, who now hosts regular trips to far away destinations.     Gary Brooker 1945-2022   Gary, who enjoyed all types of fishing from salmon in Alaska to sea fishing off the Isle of Wight, was a passionate tackle collector and had ponds at his Surrey home. He was also part of a small coterie fly fishing rock stars including Eric Clapton, the three of them regularly fishing together on the River Test. In fact above is the last fishing picture of Gary before his death to cancer in 2022, was taken on one of those trips with Pete.     The Angler lead me to the water Gary Brooker (1982)

 

 

Location, location, location  Estate agents Savills have relaunched to the market Fulling Mill on the River Itchen just upstream of Winchester, which if memory serves me correctly, originally came to the market two years ago at £5 million. It is now £3 million.   Before you rush to find the nearest cheque book you should know it is something of a curate’s egg – good in parts. The good is that it is set on 63 acres of water meadow, has a mile and a half of fishing with the Mill and Cottage totalling nearly 5,000 sq. ft. It is, as they say, in need of renovation for which you should read a complete gut job (some of which has been done) and the river is, to put it kindly, neglected. None of that is insuperable and at the price you should have plenty of headroom to do the work.     However, what is insuperable is the location the property sandwiched as it is between the M3 and the A34, with to top it off, the flight path to Southampton Airport above. And, if that was not enough of a discouragement a public footpath runs down the drive, right past the front door and through the garden. Of course, footpaths can be moved: Nether Wallop Mill had path that took a very similar route but the owners in the 1980’s managed to have it rerouted though it is a fiendishly complicated process requiring almost total unanimity of what we now call stakeholders.   In the case of Nether Wallop one member of the village retained the right to walk along the route of the old path for the duration of his lifetime, accompanied by a maximum of three members of his family, to attend church services, the right dying with his own death that occurred some 40 years later.  I suspect achieving a change of route, without some tangible gain, is much harder to do today especially in a National Park such as the South Downs in which the Fulling Mill is located.   The truth is that if you could pick Fulling Mill up and place it away from the not good parts of that curate’s egg you would be looking at a price tag of double or more; the mantra location, location, location has never been so valid. You can view the full details here. The property is offered as a whole or in three lots.

 

Quiz   The normal random collection of questions inspired by the date, events or topics in the Newsletter. It is just for fun with answers at the bottom of the page.   1)   What did German engineer Gottlieb Daimler unveil on this day in 1885?   2)   In ancient Greek folklore what was the job of a nymph?  3)   What was the purpose of a fulling mill?

 

Have a good weekend.  Best wishes,

 

 

Simon Cooper simon@fishingbreaks.co.uk Founder & Managing Directorwww.fishingbreaks.co.uk

 

 

 

Quiz answers:   1)   The world's first motorcycle 2)   They were responsible for the care of the plants and animals of their domain e.g the Potamides looked after rivers and streams. 3)   Fulling is part of the woollen cloth making process and involves cleaning and milling woven cloth to produce a material that is thicker and denser.