Canadian Angling

Canadian Angling.com (Jan. 24, 2011) Zooplankton are an extremely important food source for all aquatic animals especially fish. Zooplankton feed off of Phytoplankton, making them the second link in the marine food chain. Zooplankton then gets eaten by fish and larger crustaceans. Many trout fry actually feed on zooplankton as soon as they emerge from their eggs (except for brown trout fry that feed on algae). Many believed that zooplankton were only algae feeders, but new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that about 1/3 of their food comes from material that comes from land in lake watersheds like leaves, roots, logs, etc. Read the rest of this entry »

Canadian Angling.com (December 16, 2010) We know that it is hard to believe it, but scientists believe that fish are showing personality traits. No, they can’t talk or communicate yet, but researchers at the University of Gothenburg have found that brown trout have individual characters and show different personalities. Over the years, Bart Adriaenssens (Zoology-University of Gothenburg) has studied juvenile trout in the rivers and streams along the west coast of Sweden. He stated that “My results show that it are not just humans and other mammals that exhibit personality. Read the rest of this entry »

Canadian Angling.com (December 14, 2010) — Recently two separate studies, one in England and another in Cyprus, have raised a major concern about our rivers and lakes. The concern is what the effects that man made chemicals are having on the ecosystems that we live in and subsequently their effect on humans. We will first look at the recent research by the Universities of Exeter and Brunel on endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC’s). The universities have recently completed a 4 year study that shows that these chemicals are changing the sex of the fish. This is the first direct evidence that these “gender bending” chemicals are effecting the reproduction cycle of fish in UK Rivers. Read the rest of this entry »

Many people don’t realize this, but 2 billion gallons of water are diverted from the Great Lakes daily to tributaries of the Mississippi River at Chicago. This reduces the water levels of Port Huron and Georgian Bay but also allows invasive species (such as the Asian carp), an easy method to move from one watershed to another.
The Chicago River is 156 miles long. The problem started back at the turn of the century. Chicago was being overwhelmed from sewage and stockyard runoff and it was polluting the city’s drinking water. There were deadly outbreaks of typhoid and cholera from the polluted water. Many of the Chicago residents used to call the river “that stinking river” because of the pollution from the growing industrial economy which dumped into the river. Read the rest of this entry »

Canadian Angling.com (September 7, 2010): One of our worst fears regarding climate change is the adverse effects it has on the pollination of crops by bees. Bees are extremely important in the pollination of all pollinating flowering plants and are the major pollinator in ecosystems. Bees pollinate many of the trees and plants in our gardens. It is estimated that bees pollinate 1/3 of the food we consume. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the key species that scientists monitor is amphibian populations, like the frog. One of the major reasons that researchers like to use frogs is that they are extremely sensitive to the environment. They can warn about changes to their habitat that affect them such as pollution, chemicals and other ecological problems. Recently a study by North Carolina State shows that the data that the researchers has been using may be flawed and the population estimates may be incorrect, leading to over estimates of the frog populations. Read the rest of this entry »

Canadian Angling.com: While today’s news that the oil well in the Gulf of Mexico has finally been capped, Canada has had its own oil spill to be concerned about on the St. Lawrence River. This is the first ever oil spill on the St. Lawrence Spillway and is expected to be cleaned up in 1 week if conditions remain the same. Unfortunately the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will require many years of cleaning and much more resources to repair the damage to the environment and the people’s lives it has affected. We actually wonder if BP will actually pay for all the damage. It is their responsibility, not the taxpayer. Read the rest of this entry »

Canadian Angling.com for Kids: Scientists are still discovering facts about the Saber-toothed cats that roamed the world from 33.7 million years ago to 11,000 years ago. It is one of the more recognized animals that roamed the earth. There were many subspecies of the saber-toothed cat (like the Saber-Toothed Tiger in North and South America). Over the million of years they roamed the earth, they adapted to the environment that they lived and the species that they fed upon. Saber-toothed cats were generally stronger and vigorous than today’s cats and were quite bear-like in build compared to your cat. They were excellent hunters and hunted animals such as sloths, mammoths, and other large prey. Read the rest of this entry »

Canadian Angling.com: Lake Superior is the largest of the 5 Great Lakes of North America and is the largest fresh water lake by surface area and third largest by volume is experiencing extremely high water temperatures. Lake Superior has a surface area of approximately 31,820 square miles (82,413km) and contains 2,900 cubic miles (12,100 km³) of water. It is important to note that a dramatic change in the water temperature of such a large lake is a major concern for climatologists, ecologists, and scientists. Read the rest of this entry »

Canadian Angling.com: Scientists are now using biological markers to determine the presence of toxic substance in the river and lakes. They are using the European method of using the small freshwater shrimp (Gammarus) as their biological marker. They can see the impact the contamination has on the shrimp’s biological functions and use this as a method of measuring the contamination.

Many people do not realize that 90% of the life on this planet is made of invertebrates and they can act as an early warning system and are a key part of the food chain. Read the rest of this entry »

Canadian Angling.com Researchers at the University of Illinois recently concluded an experiment on largemouth bass lasting 20 years that found that vulnerability of being caught by fisherman is a heritable trait. The researchers used a resident population in Ridge Lake (Charleston). Fishing was restricted with fishermen having reserved fishing times allocated and all fish were placed in a live well. The fish were then recorded and tagged. They then were released.

“We kept track over four years of all of the angling that went on, and we have a total record – there were thousands of captures,” said David Philipp, ecology and conservation researcher at U of I. “Many fish were caught more than once. One fish was caught three times in the first two days, and another was caught 16 times in one year.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Canadian Angling.com Every year brings new challenges to salmon fishing in Lake Huron and this year will be no different.
“It has been a different system every three or four years for most of our lives,” Hewett (DNRE’s Fisheries Co-ordinator for Lake Huron and Erie) recently told a Port Huron fisheries workshop.
The good news for Lake Huron’s predators is that there is more prey fish available, but there is also some bad news to for the predators.
Jeff Schaeffer of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Ann Arbor research station found that the gross weight of the prey fish have doubled in the past year, but the type of prey fish has changed. Read the rest of this entry »