How do you tell what sex the barbel are? i've noticed from recent catches, that some have red blood spots on their bellies, I know they are spawning in our river as I have had some barbel fry in the kick samples that I carry out out once a month.
so I just wondered if the barbel with the red blood spots are the female.

Originally Posted by DaveM

How do you tell what sex the barbel are? i've noticed from recent catches, that some have red blood spots on their bellies, I know they are spawning in our river as I have had some barbel fry in the kick samples that I carry out out once a month. so I just wondered if the barbel with the red blood spots are the female.

I am not at all sure that it is easy to tell. Obviously, as a rule, the larger fish will be female. Red blood spots might suggest that the fish had been stirring up the gravel during the spawning process.
What is a "kick" sample, and how do you identify barbel fry? What sort of length were they? I should like to sample my local river too. Do the fry assemble with other species, or are they more likely to be found hiding amongst the gravel, like the bullheads and stone loach?
Are the results of your surveys available anywhere?

Hi mate, thanx for the reply, kick sampling, is a way of checking the water quality, you kick up the gravels with a net down stream about a foot in front of where you stir up the gravels. after 2 mins you empty the net into a tray, and check to see what invertebrate are present and record the results, this is done once a month, then then the results are sent to the E.A. if there is a drop in the amount found, then we can assume there has been a contamination in the river. we have sampling points all the way up the river, so that we can pin point where the contamination has come from.

The barbel fry are like a mini barbel, they have the 4 barbules, they seem to hide themselves in the gravels like the bullheads and stoneloach.

Hope the helps

forgot to mention, we are group of local anglers and non anglers, who decided to take things into our own hands and clean up our local river, we have been going for 4 years now, and the river has improved so much so the the EA are now introducing Grayling and brown trout are now showing up.

Cheers Dave: Kick sampling: I have done similar things myself, but didn't know what it was called, although I suspect that to get a good invertebrate count I would need to use a much finer mesh net. I was only looking really for fish and crayfish at the time. Minnows, sticklebacks, loach and bullheads, but didn't see anything else. How long were your barbel fry?

Any tips on clean up techniques would you PM me please. Removal of objects fair enough, but I assume to get the water quality better, you must have been targetting actual polluters? Via the EA?

Yeah the nets are real fine mesh, they catch everything thats kicked up.
The Barbel fry were only an inch or so, they were showing up over a 5 mile stretch.
We had to get ourselves know on the river, through media and word of mouth, this got us know to seven trent water, now they know what we do, they paid for the kick sampling course and all the equipment. So now they have stopped dumping all their crap in the river and they have cleaned their act up.

This is a link to the River Erewash foundation website, this is what we do

http:///www.rivererewashfoundation.co.uk/

My club does a similar exercise on the upper reaches of the Tees but tend to use a stone turning technique rather than kick sampling. I think the data for that is more for monitoring of the game fish than coarse stocks though.

I think there are quite a few groups doing this, our kick sampling is not to monitor fish, but to monitor invertebrate for river water quality purposes.
But it is a bonus when we find fry in the samples.