Monday 2 March 2015

Lords of the Piscine Punyverse — Whore's Drawers (Pt 5)

You never know with rivers what you're gonna get. Last week I had to wait ages for it to come down to acceptable conditions and then when it was good to go was forced to fish bank-high, mucky water, within the hour. Of course I thought I'd not get back for days but next morning was amazed to find the water not only flowing moderately but perfectly coloured once more. I guess that a localised heavy downpour in the very north of the catchment had put a great deal of water in very quickly, but the ambient precipitation over its entirety had been as low as I'd experience on the bank.

Seems good theory to me. Usually heavy rain up here means a sudden influx of dirty grey water from the great swathe of asphalt that is the M6 motorway, 640,000 square metres of which drains into the river extremely efficiently and often too quickly for comfort. Imagine how much salt finds its way in during wintertime... But the rising water had been brick red which means that it originated directly from the red sandstone agricultural plough soils found a little way upstream, but from not the M6 in any great amount.  

The Sowe. Up and down like the proverbial...

Anyways... Such perfect water meant I had to go fishing. And this time I felt I was in with half a chance of actually catching what I'd originally set out for, which was not simply fish — but data. 

So I sat down in the serene seclusion of the dell of the pool and fished the gentle swirling eddy currents, hopeful for those gudgeon I'd originally wanted to find but content to catch minnows and bullheads if they didn't show. Because they had now become the subject of my own project — a record of them and comprehensive enough to create valid charts from. 

Luckily the minnows were all too eager to feed and the jam jar was filled in short order with the first eight. Out came the quantification tackle, their vital statistics were jotted down, and they were released downstream so they wouldn't bite twice. 2 bullheads and 19 minnows were recorded in total. More than enough to flesh out the middling weight bracket for the minnow chart but very small fish were very hard to catch and none of the largest came close to the big fish I'd had on the first day who is looking to be something of a lucky capture.

Click to enlarge


What was fascinating was the weight variation between fish of near equal length. I'd never noticed it before, I mean you wouldn't, would you? A minnow is a minnow. Well, the British Standard Minnow is not the useful unit you might think it to be. The third smallest at 72mm for 4.5 grams, was just 2.2mm shorter than a fish weighing an astonishing 7.2 grams. That's an enormous difference, and I think larger than the kind of weight variation you might get between equal length cock and hen tench just prior to spawning. But minnows spawn in May and June, not February and March, so there's just a huge difference in girth between fish the year round, I guess. Come June 16th, sexing minnows will be easy because of the male's vibrant mating garb at that time. Right now it is not easy so I couldn't say whether the short and the fat, the long and the lean, were either girls or boys. 



The trend line produced by the spreadsheet is polynomial. It attempts to strike a balance between all data points therefore it will change with each new addition and in time stabilise. There's no data before the smallest, between the largest and second largest, and none after. Hence the hills and valleys and without an end point as yet, the upward whip after the largest fish. The start of the curve will be very steep with almost all fish species because they grow long in the first spurt of growth but weigh relatively speaking, very little. For instance, the six-inch roach pictured above who was caught after two bullheads but before the minnows, weighed exactly two ounces. A seven incher won't weigh very much more, perhaps three ounces or maybe four. A roach of 12 inches, though, can weigh as little as a pound but as much as a pound and a half. However, a roach three times as long as that little six-inch blade will set a new British record. That is why the trend line flattens out as weight rises. As fish mature, extra inches in their skeletal length and at great size, fractions thereof, mean absolutely everything in terms of the potential weight of flesh their frame might carry.

Which brings me neatly to the British record for minnow...



Mark Wintle has stepped in and clarified the situation. It really was 13.5 drams after all and not 13.5 grams as I (and Dr Everard) once thought. A simply huge minnow, the like of which seemed unimaginable to my boggling mind. Turns out that because of the data I've compiled so far with the addition of those fish known to have been larger than my best specimen so far, that it might be quite possible after all. Of course, Dr Everard's fish is included in the chart above, but Mark supplied a minnow of his own caught many years ago and weighed accurately on beam scales at 10.5 drams (18.6 grams) and an estimated 4.5 inches in length. The chart agrees with the accuracy of his estimation, I'd say. I've also added Russel Hilton's recent capture measured at 104mm in length but not weighed. My weight estimate for it is conservative. I don't know how fat it was but if similar in girth to my 102mm fish then it weighed approximately 14.6 grams. 

The length of the Spennymore record is also an estimation. So far as I know it was never measured. However, it's not just speculation and not so great a thing to imagine now because the data set suggests that it would have been a believable, 130mm in length, not the ridiculous 170mm I first thought it had to be. The trend line won't allow it to be very much longer nor very much shorter if the fish was normal and not diseased.  I think ±10% a reasonable deviation in length from the norm at that great weight. But then again, if two near equal length small fish can differ so very much in weight then it might have been only as long as Mark's fish, but hugely fat... 

Who knows? 

And who cares?

These are minnows we're talking about here. A fish so commonplace and miniscule that you just can't take them seriously, can you?

From top to bottom — Spennymore, Everard, Sowe largest, Sowe average. (cm)



11 comments:

  1. Regression therapy is going well then Jeff?!

    Seriously though, I can see the interest here - I'm just not brave enough to go for it myself tbh, even though my own interest is in smaller species...just not THAT small

    Strangely I admire the pursuit

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    1. They seem bigger and bigger every day, George! The more I look at them they more I see. Funny how anglers ignore the little species. A bird man would not care if a rare passing migrant was tiny — he'd queue up to spot it.

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  2. This is turning into my favourite mini series - no pun - in ages: it's fantastic see an analytical approach being applied - designing with data is good ;)

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    1. Data I like, KB. It makes sense of things that don't make any till the numbers stack up and prove things. It's strangely relaxing gathering it too. Bit like doing the washing up. really...

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  3. You do wonder how Dr Mark Everard PhD, BSc (Hons 1), MConv, FLS, CEnv, CSci, FIEnvSc got it so wrong ? a fish expert if there ever was one. He certainly got lots of publicity in 2005 and he even mentions the record breaking minnow in his 2008 book 'The little book of little fishes'. If you think about it though then sometimes these sort of mistakes are the easiest to make. Maybe it was that simple ?

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    1. I think he may have been misled by the committee or something, Mick. But once the ball was rolling and the media got wind I suppose it's hard to put such a thing down. The public liked the story though, and that's what matters. Maybe it inspired a few to look a bit harder at what's ignored, eh?

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    2. Does a photo exist of the record minnow by the way ? be nice to see it wouldn't it.

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    3. I haven't found one, MIck. I imagine it must exist in the BRFC archives, though. I wish the committee would do a better job of publishing their records. In this day and age it's unforgivable that all relevant materials pertaining to successful claims are not available for public scrutiny online. If I was on that committee it would be my mission to publish everything.

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    4. I've emailed brfc@anglingtrust.net in the past but not so much as an acknowledgement. As you say this day and age wouldn't take much to publish records would it.

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  4. Very great post. I simply stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed browsing your weblog posts. After all I’ll be subscribing on your feed and I am hoping you write again very soon!

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  5. Hatt, you're clearly off yer rocker! But this is tremendous stuff - keep it coming please!

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