Fishmonitoring on the River Tay in the year 1905...

...and in the following years. In the year 1905 Peter Donald Malloch started a big tagging campaign with salmon smolts, the results of this have not lost any of actuality. The hereby presented informations are an extract out of the book "LIFEHISTORY AND HABITS OF SALMON SEATROUT AND OTHER FRESHWATERFISH" 2. Edition of 1912.(under circumstances to be ordered under www.abebooks.com )

In the year 1905 migrating salmon smolts were tagged with silver wire in the dorsal fin in river Tay in Scotland by P.D.Malloch. In the previous years detailed tests on how to tag a smolt without damaging the smolt on the one hand and how to manage that a big msw-fish can be recognized when returning from sea. In the following years returning salmon were checked for taggings and scale samples were taken from the recatches. The results about the mogrationperiods of the diffent runs are shown in the following table. The weight declarations show that fishes that stayed longer at sea were bigger than the ones that run up earlier in the season

	The most important information is : All around the year there are salmon in the river. This statement was affirmed for other british rivers and was also known by the author for russia - it may be taken for serious that all around the year there are salmon in the river with peaks at the top of the single runs. To underline this statement you have to keep in mind that the msw-fishes stayed up to 13 months within the river before spawning !
			By counting the rings of scale samples the age of a salmon could be determined up to a month precise. Moreover Malloch was able to tell how often a fish had been to freshwater and how often it had spawned !
	Silver wire mark on a returning spring fish caught on the 18th of february 1907 in the river Tay after beeing marked as a smolt in may 1905.
			Before the monitoring it was thought that the bulltrout (upper fish) is a different species because of the differnent appearance and the flesh beeing white.