River Bran Smolt Trapping started
The Smolt trap on the River Bran at Achanalt was opened on the 31st of march. This trap is used to catch the entire smolt run of the Bran, the smolts are then loaded into a transport tank and trucked past the hydo scheme before being released below Tor Achilty Dam. Not only does this maintain the Bran as a salmon river by avoiding Luichart Dam (which is passable upstream but not downstream), it also allows long term monitoring of smolt production and marine survival. In collaboration with Marine Scotland Science a thousand of the smolts from the Bran trap are tagged each year with electronic PIT tags. When the adult fish return either as grilse next year or 2 sea winter salmon in 2016, the tags numbers of individual fish are recorded by automatic decoders in the hydro dams.
