Help Required From Tweed Brown Trout Anglers

During the 2016 Brown trout season the Tweed Foundation trialed spot pattern recognition software which allows individual Brown trout to be identified from the spot pattern on their gill cover. Amongst other things, it was hoped that this might give us a tool to look into how often individual Brown trout are caught by anglers and possibly pick up some Brown trout movement. Several volunteers from a number of Tweed Angling Associations were enlisted to take pictures of the left gill cover of the trout of roughly 1lb and over that they caught. Whilst the anglers involved represented only a small proportion of the trout anglers on the Tweed the results were very encouraging and last season’s initial findings were summarized here.

In 2017 we’d like to include more anglers in the project so if you’d be willing to help out your assistance would be very much appreciated. All you need to do is take pictures of the left gill cover of any Brown trout you catch of 1lb (34cm or 14”) or over within the Tweed catchment then contact Tweed Trout & Grayling Biologist Kenny Galt at kgalt@tweedfoundation.org.uk to arrange a method of transferring the picture files. A video showing how to take pictures of Brown trout gill covers without causing the fish any undue stress can be found on the Tweed Foundation YouTube page via this link.