Steve Wozniak

Well it certainly seems to be a time for breaking records. An angler has just become the first person in the world to break the ultimate fishing record, by reeling in an astounding 1,000 different species of fish.

Steve Wozniak, a native Californian 47 years of age, has spent a decade on his quest for mastering the creatures of the sea, and he has made his rounds in over 63 different countries to accomplish his goal. He has spent an astonishing 20,000 hours fishing on piers, beaches, riverbanks and boats just waiting for a fish to take the line. He has caught everything from a small minnow to a giant 900 pound beast of a shark.

Steve has shelled out an amazing amount of money, more than 50,000 Great Brish Pounds and has stored up somewhere in the neighborhood of one million air miles by traipsing around the world, his rod and his tackle box his only companion for 10 years.

Steve has made his rounds on every continent minus Antarctica, including such places as the exotic Isle of Wight and the far reaches of Cambodia.

He has managed to capture just about every freshwater fish which calls Britain home and has spent 2 years and 4,000 Great British Pounds trying to land himself an Atlantic salmon from Scotland.

What can we say? The man loves his fishing. In a week full of broken records, we’d like to welcome Steve to the ranks of the Big Fish.

Alligator Snapping Turtle

A fisherman, Steve Bellion aged 23, was out at Earlswood Resevoir angling for carp when he caught a little more than he bargained for. He managed to reel in a 57 lb (27 kg) reptile!

He dragged it to shore where it was easily identified as an 80 year old alligator snapping turtle. This is a rare catch indeed, as these turtles are generally only found in the eastern corners of the United States.

This has solved a rather puzzling mystery for the local fishermen. There has been many a tale told for a decade, of a giant creature biting through lines and roughing up ducks.

Alligator snapping turtle

The ancient Alligator Snapping Turtle, identified as being female, was transferred to the West Midland Safari Park, where it is going to be held in quarantine for the customary 30 days and checked over by the veterinary team there.

Alligator Snapping Turtles can live to be 160 years old, making it one of the longest living creatures to be hauled to shore in the area.

Once it has finished being checked over, it will be transferred to a vivarium with a male of the species.

“They have been known to attack small domestic pets or children, but I don’t think this one would have drifted to far from the water.” stated the director of wildlife at the safari park, Bob Lawrence. At first glance it seems that the turtle is in perfect health, as it should be after gorging itself on the local wildlife.

He went on to add that this really brings to light the danger of introducing foreign species into Britain’s waterways, much the same way that American signal crayfish have created quite a dip in the UK’s national crayfish population.

Florida anglers are being sharply criticized after a video of them free-gaffing a Mako shark off South Florida this week was made public on the Internet.

In the video, which was uploaded to Youtube and also displayed on the website of a Florida TV station (can be seen below), the anglers can be seen trying to gaff a free-swimming shark. The shark ventured close to the boat after being attracted to a swordfish that the anglers had alongside their vessel.

Since no rods or reels appear to have been used by the anglers as they captured the 748-pound Mako shark, they may have acted in violation of state and federal law. “I’d hazard that I’m not the first to pick up on these fine points of the law but if the video does indeed tell the full tale then these laws need to be enforced,” said Luke Tipple, a marine biologist and director of the Shark-Free Marina Initiative. “If however the fishermen can provide video evidence of them using PRIMARY tackle (i.e. hook and line) to initialize the capture then they would be within their rights to have landed the shark. If this turns out to be the case then I will instead turn this report into a cautionary tale of how the media should be more responsible in reporting on shark harvests, particularly when dealing with species considered by some to be globally threatened.”

The inclination to end up stuck on a hook seems to be a heritable trait in bass, according to a study published in a recent issue of the Transactions of the American Fisheries Society.

The study, which was carried out by researchers DP Philipp, SJ Cooke, JE Claussen, JB Koppelman, CD Suski, and DP Burkett, focused on Ridge Lake, an Illinois lake where catch-and-release fishing has been enforced and strictly regulated for decades. Each caught fish has been measured, tagged and then released back into the wild.

Picture by: Clinton & Charles Robertson from Del Rio, Texas & San Marcos, TX, USA

David Philipp and coauthors commenced their study in 1977, checking the prevalence of Largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides) on the hooks of fishermen. After four years, the experimental lake was drained and 1,785 fish were collected. When checking the tags, Philipp and his team found that roughly 15 percent of the Largemouth bass population consisted of specimens that had never been caught. They also found out that certain other bass specimens had been caught over and over again.

To take the study one step further, the research team collected never caught bass specimens (so called Low Vulnerability, LV, specimens) and raised a line of LV offspring in separate brood ponds. Likewise, the team collected bass specimens caught at least four times (High Vulnerability, HV, specimens) and placed them in their own brooding ponds to create a HV line.

The first generation (F1) offspring from both lines where then marked and placed together in the same pond. During the summer season, anglers where allowed to visit the pond and practise catch-and-release, and records where kept of the number of times each fish was caught.

As the summer came to an end, HV fish caught three or more times where used to create a new line of HV offspring, while LV fish caught no more than once became the parents of a new LV line.

The second generation (F2) offspring went through the same procedure as their parents; they were market, released into the same pond, and subjected to anglers throughout the summer. In fall, scientists gathered the fish that had been caught at least three times or no more than once and placed them in separate ponds to create a third generation (F3) HV and LV fish.

A following series of controlled fishing experiments eventually showed that the vulnerability to angling of the HV line was greater than that of the LV line, and that the differences observed between the two lines increased across later generations.

If this is true not only for bass but for other fish species as well, heavy hook-and-line angling pressure in lakes and rivers may cause evolutionary changes in the fish populations found in such lakes. Hence, a lake visited by a lot of anglers each year may eventually develop fish populations highly suspicious of the fishermen’s lure.

More information can be found in the paper published in Transactions of the American Fisheries Society: Philipp, DP, SJ Cooke, JE Claussen, JB Koppelman, CD Suski and

DP Burkett (2009) Selection for vulnerability to angling in Largemouth Bass. Transactions of the American Fisheries Society 138, pp. 189–199.