Each fish has its favorite area in the river
Bruno Garcia of the Charente Maritime fishing federation is interested this week on France Bleu la Rochelle in the “fish zoning.
Bruno Garcia : I’m not going to talk to you about parking meters and regulated parking zones. I will discuss the position of the fish according to the zones. A bream has no place in a mountain torrent and a trout will have no place in a marsh channel. This chronicle follows the remark of a fisherman who during a check this week said to me: “we don’t catch roach but only bream in most of the canals of the marsh, we should dump some”.
So how did you answer him?
Each species has its favorite area according to its biological requirements. It’s like with invertebrates, you know those little creatures, those larvae that you find in waterways. Depending on the aquatic animal present you can define the type of watercourse. If you find a chironomid, a mosquito larva you are rather in a degraded context, if you find a stonefly you are on a dynamic and oxygenated watercourse.
Which means that if there are no roaches on this marsh channel it is quite simply that the conditions are not met for them to be there?
That’s precisely it! I explained to this fisherman that the absence of roaches could be explained given the quality of this watercourse. So we distinguish different zones for different fish, distributed according to the quality of the watercourse? Each species has specific needs, different criteria must be taken into account such as temperature, current, sediments, vegetation, food resources, etc. To be synthetic we will speak of four distinct zones on a watercourse.
We start with the river, the source, the upstream…
The opportunity to review the vocabulary for the upstream for example. A technical memo means, upstream as a mountain, the upper part of the watercourse. The downstream as a valley, the lower part of the watercourse. The opportunity also to define the different shores. You position the source in the back, the upstream in the back so, on the right hand it is the right bank, on the left hand it is the left bank.
So these four areas?
Upstream, the trout zone, a dynamic and oxygenated facies. You imagine a mountain torrent. You can also find sculpins, small indicator fish of this area. Then comes the shadow zone, a little slower but with a strong current all the same. The latter precedes the barbel zone, a context where there is less current where pike and roach are also located and we end in the bream and pike-perch zone where this fisherman practiced. Less demanding species that are content with stagnant and poorly oxygenated waters. In summary, the roach a little more demanding than the bream have nothing to do on this part of the watercourse. Dumping it would be useless.
A notice to users
The non-motorized nautical event “Escapade on the Charente river” organized by the CDA of Saintes, Sunday July 17, 2022 is cancelled.
The organization of this event will be postponed to Sunday, September 25, 2022.