River Wensum barbel project

A project designed to examine and determine the fate of stocked barbel in a lowland chalk fed river, the River Wensum.

Once a famous roach fishery back in the late 1950's and 1960's. More recently the Wensum has been renown for its' barbel fishing and particularly the size of some specimen fish, culminating, most notably,  Mark Rylands' 20.12 beast back in Februay 2008 and Chris Mack's monster 21.02 in November the same year. During the halcyon days of barbel fishing the Wensum supported several fisheries run by the Norfolk Anglers Conservation Association (NACA), though despite Mark and Chris' amazing fish, the fishery was in decline for a number of reasons. Fast forward to 2009 when NACA approached the Environment Agency (EA) and Natural England (NE) for help in turning the fishery around.  A robust case based upon socio-economics was put to NE which resulted in consent to stock barbel under strict conditions. The project was to stock barbel in consecutive years, monitoring their movements and determining their fate. Simultaneously, the EA Fisheries staff would survey the riffles at a number of locations to determine barbel presence and the proportion of stocked versus native fish.

We designed and built a number of RFID passive induction transponder (PIT)  loop aerials/antennae which were installed at locations within each stocked reach. Along with our technical partners, we designed a telemetric system (WebLink) that enabled a direct link from fish detected at the aerials to be viewed real-time on the internet.

Anglers provided assistance with stocking the fish, reporting fish movements and identifying fish mortalities. The project is currently being evaluated and the data analysed for publication

With considerable help from the EA, the anglers, NACA and Fishtrack the project ran from 2009-2013 and we successfully stocked more than 4500 tagged barbel. Fishtrack tagged all the fish with PIT tags. PIT tags are energised upon encountering an aerial, transmitting their data and this being directed back to the website. In this way, each fish could be uniquely identified if it encounters an aerial.

barbel diurnal movements per month