THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

The other fifty in the anaesthetic bucket were later preserved in alcohol to provide baseline data against
which to compare the pond experiment one year on.
With that aspect of the project under-way, the next big job was to explore the potential for extent of
asymmetry, and to determine which would be the best traits to use to get consistently accurate data
from.
For this, a pilot study was required looking for changing levels of FA at locations with good, bad, and
intermediate water quality as determined by routine EA monitoring data, and all on the same
watercourse so as to be sampling what was essentially the same base population.
At this point I still needed to ascertain the best traits to use, so I took measurements left and right from
as many paired traits as I could find, eventually settling on the nine best ones to be measured using
thirty fish at each sampling site, and as I had hoped, these did indeed show that symmetry loss initially
appeared to be greatest where water quality was poorest.
On that basis then, though still obviously pending the results of the heritability and reversibility
experiments, the long hard slog of identifying fifty suitable sites, hand netting thirty specimens from
each, then laboriously measuring the same nine traits for the mathematical and statistical analysis later
could proceed.
The fifty sites in question needed to have an even spread, not only in terms of water quality ranging
from pristine to grossly polluted, but according to historical EA data, they also had to have been that
way of at least the previous three years to ensure that all fish sampled had been constantly subjected to
the stresses of that particular location, which I have to say was very much easier said than done,
particularly at the pristine end of the scale. Consequently, a great many potential sampling sites ruled
themselves out.
After their year in the garden pond, and with the Class 4 FA results to hand from the 'unfortunate fifty'
providing the reversibility baseline comparison data, the fifty fish at liberty in the pond were netted out.
By this stage unfortunately, probably due to predation either by birds or by cats, their numbers had
declined to the low forties. However, on the plus side they had bred. So the offspring were put into a
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