Sharing My Barbel Study Facts

I FEEL I must respond to the letters regarding the otters and barbel debate in the Letters page (AM, Sept. 26).

Steve Pope once again presents his, and presumably the Barbel Society’s, stance as “stating the obvious”, when the situation is anything but.

The decline in barbel in some rivers is unlikely to be due to one factor, but is most likely due to a range of factors combining in different ways on different rivers. To single out predation from otters as the sole cause is irresponsible and unsupportable and, I must repeat, ill-informed and ill-considered. The Barbel Society has apparently lost the plot, and seems to be cynically seeking popularity rather than the truth.

Steve also states that I am suffering from a “total lack of empathy” with anglers whose barbel rivers are affected. What a ridiculous and insulting thing to say! I fished most of those rivers for years, rivers such as the Great Ouse, Kennet, Dorset Stour, Bristol Avon and Wensum, have shared the concerns of anglers, and I have spent a huge amount of time and effort in enabling research and habitat improvement on many of them.

Much of the evidence from the research on the Ouse points at poor gravel quality and low summer flows as factors that affect barbel recruitment. Some 20 radio-tagged Ouse barbel survived quite happily for 18 months, the life of the tag batteries, without being chomped by otters.

On one stretch of the Kennet, scale readings from fish that I sampled showed that most fish were very old, mostly between 15 and 21, and that was nine years ago. They died of old age, not otter predation, and almost no recruitment was happening.

Research I was involved with on the Hampshire Avon found scales from one small barbel in hundreds of otter spraint samples, with small fish and crayfish main items of diet, supporting all previous and subsequent spraint analysis.