sailfish - popular game fish

When the practice of catch and release was introduced, a lot of anglers were upset. How can you preserve your memorable trophy catches if you aren’t allowed to bring it home? Today, the trend has shifted – a lot of sport fishers love catch and release since it has boosted fish populations and allowed more anglers to catch larger specimens. Also, the conundrum about how to mount a released fish has been solved, thanks to modern fish taxidermy.

Today, there is no need to bring your fish to the taxidermist to have it mounted. Instead, you contact one of the many fish taxidermists that specializes in fish replicas and provide them with as much details as possible about your catch, e.g. species, sex, length and weight. If you have a photograph of the fish, this will also be helpful.

The fish taxidermist will take that information and use it to create a lifelike fish replica, typically from fiber glass. The replica will then be painstakingly painted to look as much as your catch as possible. If you hire a highly skilled fish taxidermist, a replica like this can actually be even more lifelike than the stuffed skin of a dead fish can ever hope to achieve.

To get a fish preserved has always been expensive. With the advent of modern fish replicas, a new option has become available for anglers on a budget. Instead of having a replica crafted and painted to look exactly like your catch, you can send in details about size and species and get a high-quality ready-made fish replica as a tribute to your trophy catch. This is much less expensive, and if you order from a top-notch producer you will get a replica that really looks like a living specimen of that particular species.

Fish taxidermy has also become greener during recent years when it comes to the actual preservation process. The greenest alternative is of course to go for a fish replica since that requires not preservation at all, but if you really want to have an actual fish stuffed and mounted it is today possible to find fish taxidermists that will carry out the process using a minimum of toxins. Earlier, being a taxidermist was quite a dangerous occupation since a lot of toxic compounds were used to ward off decay, such as the infamous arsenic soap. Arsenic is highly toxic and can be fatal, even in small amounts. Doses too small to cause acute symptoms can still lead to long-term problems such as cancer. The tannins used to preserve the color of the skins were also frequently dangerous, for the tanner as well as for the environment. Even though the taxidermy field has a long way to go yet, significant improvements have been achieved during the last few decades, especially in countries were more stringent occupational and environmental laws have been enacted.

Red snapper

Snapper fry are all over the place. There are also trout, grunt and grouper fry all over the place as well. The early tabulation of the annual count in the beds of grass spattered about the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico seems to suggest that the larvae of some kinds of fish have survived the BP oil fiasco, and what’s more, there are swarms of them.

“My preliminary assessment, it looks good, it looks like we dodged a bullet. In terms of the numbers of baby snapper and other species present in the grass beds, things look right,” commented a scientist with the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Marine Science, Joel Fodrie, who has been actively involved in the study of seagrass meadows along the coast for the past five years.

Joel’s group has taken samples of the different sea life in the grass beds in Alabama, Mississippi, and the Florida Panhandle. They will be taking a sample from around Louisiana’s Chandeleur Islands come this Autumn.

Back at the height of the fiasco, when a seemingly endless stream of oil was floating about on the surface, researchers were most concerned as to whether the trillions of larvae which hatch each spring offshore would survive the severe contamination of the spill.
It’s looking like they did, and it’s a good thing too. It just goes to show you that mother nature is more resilient than we give her credit for. There is hope yet for the Gulf to make a full recovery, and that folks, is good news indeed.

In an effort to curb the population of invasive Atlantic sea lampreys (Petromyzon marinus) in the North American Great Lakes, researchers are now testing a “love trap” in northern Michigan.

The traps will be scented with an odour produced by male lampreys during mating and researchers hope that this smelly love potion will lure female lampreys into the traps.

“We are trying to fool them into a fatal love,” said researcher Nick Johnson who will spend the next three years evaluating the effectiveness of the method.

The traps will be placed in ten streams around the Great Lakes, since lampreys swim into streams when it’s time to mate. After spawning, they die.

The Atlantic sea lamprey is native to the Atlantic Ocean but has been able to migrate into the Great Lakes through man-made shipping canals. The first specimens where seen in the region as early as the 1830s. By the 1950s, lampreys had decimated native populations of lake trout and white fish by rasping through their skin and sucking out their blood and bodily fluids. Several other populations of large and commercially important food fish had also been severely damaged by the new resident.

Since 1955, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have worked closely on the Great Lakes Fishery Commission to control the Atlantic sea lampreys, using lampricides (substances toxic to lamprey larvae), migration barriers, and sterilization of male lampreys. Hopefully, the new pheromone scented traps will prove an efficient addition to their arsenal.

Chinese ichthyologists Yang, Chen and Yang have described three new species of snow trout in a paper[1] published in the journal Zootaxa[2]. All three species have been described from material previously identified as one single species, Schizothorax griseus. True trouts belong to the Salmoninae subfamily in the Salmonidae family, but snow trouts are members of the family Cyprinidae.

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Actinopterygii
Order: Cypriniformes
Family: Cyprinidae
Genus: Schizothorax

New species: Schizothorax beipanensis

Schizothorax heterophysallidos

Schizothorax nudiventris

Schizothorax beipanensis

Schizothorax beipanensis is found in southern China where it inhabits the Beipan River drainage, a part of the Pearl River drainage. It has been encountered in both slow-flowing deep pools and fast-flowing rivers with clear water and over a wide range of different bottom substrate, from mud and sand to rocks, boulders and pebbles.

Schizothorax beipanensis differs from its close relatives by having well-developed upper and lower lips (the lower lip is actually tri-lobed), no horny sheath on the lower jaw, and a continuous postlabial groove with a minute median lobe.

Schizothorax heterophysallidos

Just like Schizothorax beipanensis, the snow trout Schizothorax heterophysallidos is found in the Pearl River drainage in southern China, but it lives in the river drainage of Nanpan, not Beipan. Schizothorax heterophysallidos lives in small streams where the bottom consists of sand and pebbles.

The name heterophysallidos is derived from the unusual swim bladder of this fish; physallis is the Greek word for bladder and heteros means different. In addition to the swim bladder (the posterior chamber of the air bladder is three to six times longer than the anterior chamber), Schizothorax heterophysallidos can be recognized on its well-developed and trilobed lower lip, thin upper lip, and blunt snout. It has a continuous postlabial groove with a minute median lobe and the last unbranched dorsal-fin ray has a strong lower part. In mature specimens, the abdomen lacks scales.

Schizothorax nudiventris

Schizothorax nudiventris also lives in southern China, but in the upper parts of the Mekong River drainage. The Mekong basin is one of the richest areas of biodiversity in the world. More than 1200 species of fish have been identified here and the number is believed to increase as the area becomes more thoroughly explored by science.

Schizothorax nudiventris has a well-developed and trilobed lower lip, thin upper lip, blunt snout, and continuous postlabial groove. The body is decorated with irregular black spots on the sides, and the last one-quarter of the last unbranched dorsal-fin ray is soft. In mature specimens, the abdomen has no scales, and it is this feature that has given the fish its name nudiventris. Nudus is the Latin word for naked, while venter means abdomen.