This link below takes you to a short video showing key things to look for when you catch a fish and how to identify if its a Farmed Salmon. With 48,000 fish escaping from Carradale 3 weeks ago, they are beginning to turn up in our rivers and they pose a huge threat to wild atlantic salmon. They can breed with wild fish weakening our stocks so it is essential to kill them when caught.
With anglers concerned about where they stand on CAT 3 rivers, the Scottish Government’s Conservation measures legislation from 2016 excludes farmed salmon from conservation regulations but leaves it up to anglers to distinguish between wild and farmed fish. This video will help. Please take time to inspect every fish you catch as we don’t want any mistakes. Should you catch a farmed salmon, please take scales from the upper side of the fish and and contact the Ayrshire Rivers Trust (details provided in the video). They should also be reported to the Fish Health Inspector using the forms provided in previous posts on our web page. The advice is not to eat these fish.
Wild salmon turn red when time to spawn in the river .
Will the farm salmon turn the same colour. Or stay silver .
Some of the Boys in my club ,are arguing about not killing
Famed fish . With our river being a cat 3 this year
If no fin damaged there happy to set it free .
Is there other ways of tell .we don’t want to kill fish
Then ask we want to be sure , our season is open till 31/10/20
Some information would be a help thanks
They do colour up but these fish have been slow to do so as they appear to be sexually immature and hopefully won’t breed this year. This may create a problem next season and make them very difficult to distinguish from wild salmon.