"Natural fish/cultivated fish" and national records.
Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2011 10:08 am
When does a record become meaningless? - perhaps when, in a scientific way, it says nothing about the natural world. Allow me to elaborate.
When Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile, the world was informed of a new level of human achievement. Bannister's achievement told us something we did not know beforehand: concerning the limits of the human body and human endeavour. In a similar manner, when Walker caught Ravioli/Clarissa at Redmire, the UK woke up to the fact that carp could grow naturally to an immense size in British waters. Walker's record then, like Bannister's, was of great scientific interest and value.
Now, if Bannister had been taking performance enhancing drugs, his achievement would have told us very little concerning the natural limits of the human body, and the world would have felt cheated. Likewise, if Walker had merely landed a fish that had been stocked big into Redmire, - a carp that had been fed artificially beforehand, to make it huge - his achievement would have had far less relevance as a scientific record.
And records mean nothing unless they have scientific value: that is why, originally, records of the natural world were kept.
It is about time, therefore, that anglers demand a distinction between natural and cultivated fish, when it comes down to rod-caught records?
A carp's skeletal growing period is in the region of 13/15 years - so why fish a water where the fish have only been stocked more recently than that? I would say that 15 years in a water, as a provable fact, is a starting point to decide whether a big fish is "wild" or not. Otherwise it should be classified as a "cultivated" carp, or at least unproven.
This would rule out any claims on the record by fish shipped in from France or grown on in large tanks. I find it incredible that some commercial fisheries now use automated boilie guns to blast out bait into lakes night and day, and so feed up the carp stocks. These fish cannot be considered other than cultivated carp, in my view, and any "record" fish caught from such waters should only be greeted with a knowing smile.
Haven't we reached an incredible point where, say, a 60lb carp from Redmire would almost certainly be the largest rod-caught "natural" carp in the UK - and yet, it would not hold the record...
When Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile, the world was informed of a new level of human achievement. Bannister's achievement told us something we did not know beforehand: concerning the limits of the human body and human endeavour. In a similar manner, when Walker caught Ravioli/Clarissa at Redmire, the UK woke up to the fact that carp could grow naturally to an immense size in British waters. Walker's record then, like Bannister's, was of great scientific interest and value.
Now, if Bannister had been taking performance enhancing drugs, his achievement would have told us very little concerning the natural limits of the human body, and the world would have felt cheated. Likewise, if Walker had merely landed a fish that had been stocked big into Redmire, - a carp that had been fed artificially beforehand, to make it huge - his achievement would have had far less relevance as a scientific record.
And records mean nothing unless they have scientific value: that is why, originally, records of the natural world were kept.
It is about time, therefore, that anglers demand a distinction between natural and cultivated fish, when it comes down to rod-caught records?
A carp's skeletal growing period is in the region of 13/15 years - so why fish a water where the fish have only been stocked more recently than that? I would say that 15 years in a water, as a provable fact, is a starting point to decide whether a big fish is "wild" or not. Otherwise it should be classified as a "cultivated" carp, or at least unproven.
This would rule out any claims on the record by fish shipped in from France or grown on in large tanks. I find it incredible that some commercial fisheries now use automated boilie guns to blast out bait into lakes night and day, and so feed up the carp stocks. These fish cannot be considered other than cultivated carp, in my view, and any "record" fish caught from such waters should only be greeted with a knowing smile.
Haven't we reached an incredible point where, say, a 60lb carp from Redmire would almost certainly be the largest rod-caught "natural" carp in the UK - and yet, it would not hold the record...