The GWCT fisheries department have been flat out over the last two weeks on the river Frome catching and tagging 10,000 young salmon and 3,000 young trout as part of the SAMARCH project.

These young fish are individually tagged with a tiny PIT tag, similar to the tag a vet would put in your dog or cat to identify them using a scanner. These young fish will migrate to sea in the spring of 2019 and 2020 and the survivors will then return as adults and the tags will be read by our tag receivers in the river.

We need to tag such large numbers to ensure we get enough data from returning adults, this is because the fishes’ survival rate from now on, both in the river and at sea is very low. This work along with similar work on the rivers Tamar in Devon and the Scorff, Oir and Bresle is key to the data modelling Work Package in the SAMARCH project where the survival estimates, both in the river and at sea will go to sharpen the models used by the UK and French governments to manage salmon and trout stocks.