blowies in the swan
Submitted by lastcast on Sun, 2013-04-14 21:49
talking to a mate the other day, as we know there is a permanent plague of bowies in the swan / canning system. The reason is likely that the water quality is so poor, however the result is that other species, prawns and whatnot, just get eaten as juveniles. He suggested a fix: have fisheries rig up an old prawn trawler and just take the bastards out. Chuck the good stuff back. I reckon a cuple of months of this and you would see a serious improvement in the river. Comments anyone ?
tim-o
Posts: 4657
Date Joined: 24/05/11
Exchange dead blowies for
Exchange dead blowies for cash, give kids something to do, 10 bucks a kg
I am, as I've said, merely competent. But in an age of incompetence, that makes me extraordinary.
sea-kem
Posts: 14857
Date Joined: 30/11/09
Ha ha Gov buy back. Is the
Ha ha Gov buy back. Is the restocking of river prawns going to be affected by the Blowies? Anyone anyone?
Love the West!
lastcast
Posts: 215
Date Joined: 04/04/13
restocking prawns
into such an aggressive environment is a farce, a political stunt. However if a few (surprisingly cheap) things were done first - such as getting rid of most of the blowies - yep it could work.
Auslobster
Posts: 1901
Date Joined: 03/05/08
Getting rid of blowies...
...have to work out how/why they got there in the first place; otherwise they'll just keep coming back, and probably in greater numbers. No one wants to continually shovel endless piles of money into a "pushing shit uphill" situation...
hlokk
Posts: 4290
Date Joined: 04/04/08
Isn't that what the
Isn't that what the government is best at?
A comment from an article:
“Blowies have infested the entire WA coastline from east of Esperance, north to Shark Bay and they now thrive in every estuary. The time has come to wonder just how bad our blowfish plague can get.”
Guess the year ;)
hlokk
Posts: 4290
Date Joined: 04/04/08
Answer was 1973 btw
Answer was 1973 btw
Ben85
Posts: 442
Date Joined: 20/11/11
yep its enough to put some
yep its enough to put some people off fishing for good. I went down to hillarys north wall yesty afternoon to try my luck on some herring. it was bloody impossible to get any bait past the blowies. They're as bad as carp in my opinion.
lastcast
Posts: 215
Date Joined: 04/04/13
auslobster,
I don't think its rocket surgery to guess that they're out o control because
a) they thrive in horrible conditions, their competition does not
B) due to rock walls, upstream dams, soluble fertilisers + pollutants, the water quality is horrible
C) they have no natuaral predators
What I'm saying is that it would take a few years to fix b) above - and that is if the govt
Was trying to do this, which it isn't. whereas the blowies could be taken out
Cheaply to give everything else a chance in the meanwhile.
Auslobster
Posts: 1901
Date Joined: 03/05/08
Where do I start?
A)Horrible conditions? Doesn't the river also support bream, flathead, tailor, crabs, mulloway, etc/etc/etc? And there are bazillions of blowies in all the metro (and beyond) marinas, as well as the Peel and Bunbury estuary systems...by your line of reasoning, all of these places have "horrible" water quality.
B)You pretty much repeated yourself from A) so I'll leave it at that...
C)Don't be too sure of them having no predators...I have caught flounder, tailor, and even tuna with large quantities of blowfish in their stomachs...
Now, how does the government eradicate the blowies from the river? Run trawl nets from the upper reaches right down to the mouth? I couldn't POSSIBLY see any problems arising from that, can you? Why don't we do what the Filipinos did to their reefs and blow the whole thing up? Problem solved! My point is, we have to establish why we are plagued with these things in the first place, and, as silly as it seems, maybe stop to consider that blowfish might actually be a necessary part of the environment...you know, being scavengers they clean up all the dead and rotting materials and such. As fishermen, what are we supposed to do? Stop using bait and berley for starters...you're simply giving the little bastards a free banquet...
sea-kem
Posts: 14857
Date Joined: 30/11/09
Japs eat them....maybe
Japs eat them....maybe there's a market for them? Need to think laterally with these things. Surely the blowie issue was though about before they tipped all those buckets of juvenille prawns in the river.....Surely.
Love the West!
lastcast
Posts: 215
Date Joined: 04/04/13
when I take my wooden
boat out in the swan, if I don't clean it, it starts to stink. This doesn't
happen with water from Mindarie or elsewhere in the ocean. Thus the
water quality comment. Blowies form predictable schools so no need
for Philipino tactics, it would be easy to take out most of them. And yes,
they do play a role, but anytime one thing is so dominant there is a
problem. Have a look at the autopy results of the swan dolphins and
ask yourself if there is a problem here. Seems to me that the answer
is pretty clear.