Don't dump unwanted goldfish in waterways

While the Milne Dam fishway on the Rouge River’s primary function is to assist migrating rainbow trout that make their way upstream from Lake Ontario each spring, the Markham facility has been useful in other areas of environmental study.
Mark Heaton, Ministry of Natural Resources’ fisheries technician, noted the fishway has also been an asset in monitoring invasive species inhabiting the river.
Goldfish have become a nuisance snce the fishway began operation three years ago, Mr. Heaton said.
Yes, those same fish people have in their aquariums at home or in the office.
Unfortunately, it has now reached the point where there is a migratory run of these fish on the Rouge River that follows the annual run of rainbow trout, Mr. Heaton said.
Unlike the goldfish you might see in an aquarium, the fish inhabiting the Rouge River are a little bigger in size.
They can be one to 1 1/2 pounds, Mr. Heaton said.
Some of these fish are three to four inches long and are working their way out to Lake Ontario, which is not a good thing, Mr. Heaton added.
He suspects these fish found their way into the Rouge River because people did not wish to keep them as pets any longer and just dump them into the feeder streams or the Rouge River itself.
“The fishway has definitely been a focal point for monitoring invasive species,” Heaton said.
In addition to the presence of goldfish, other invasive species include carp, sea lamprey and coy, he added.
With the presence of the fishway, ministry officials been able to collect various invasive species and remove them from the Rouge River watershed.
Mr. Heaton hopes people will come to the understanding that it is not good to release unwanted aquarium fish, such as goldfish, into the natural watersheds.
“If we can collect these invasive species at the fishway, they won’t be in the Rouge River and it will help improve the water quality of the Rouge River,” Mr. Heaton said. “And, it can help us understand the influences of people and how they can affect the watershed.
“We need to inform people that it’s not good to release pets into the wild.”
As for this year’s annual rainbow trout run, the fishway has assisted close to 100 fish over the first two days of operation that began at the start of April, Mr. Heaton said.
“And, we’ve seen some good-sized fish,” Mr. Heaton said. “Some of the really larger fish were (a little less than) five kilograms.”
With the ministry and members of the Metro East Anglers operating the fishway over the next few weeks, Mr. Heaton hopes they can move some 300 fish or more into the Rouge River headwaters.
As a part of the rainbow trout transfer, they will try to collect any mature eggs and, with the assistance of volunteers from the Metro East Anglers, raise them at the nearby Ringwood Fish Culture Station.
In addition, any fish collected from the cages in the fishway will be microchipped.
This will be done with an attempt to monitor their movements after spawning, Mr. Heaton said.
“If we can get a miccrochip from a fish that we had already placed one on we can find out when the fish was tagged the previous year and then we will know how big they were then and how much they’ve grown since that period,” he said.
Since the fishway has been in operation, Mr. Heaton said it has served its purpose well.
“It has provded some interesting insights as to fish that reside in the Rouge River and those that migrate from Lake Ontario,” he said.

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cheap jordans: Were you wanting to know about the microchips? They put a microchip in each fish to identify that individual fish - the same kind of microchip you can get to identify your pet in case it gets out of its collar. It is not a radio transmitter so you can't use it to find the fish by satelite or a radio receiver. You can only get a reading from it by running a scanner over the fish. Then, every time the fish is caught and scanned, they'll know which fish it was, where it was tagged, when it was tagged, and any other information they recorded when the fish was tagged (e.g., length and weight). That way they can find out how long the fish live, where they go outside the breeding season, and lots of other information.