I am curious to know if there are any studies out there on river netting.
What is the behavior of fish when they are confronting a net in their patch?

Just curious.

Not sure what you mean..... mono nets are pretty much invisible to them.

The only behavior they're inclined to after meeting up with one is to try to swim through it.

Skywalker,
I am curious to know what is the behavior of fish when they encounter a net in their path.
When a fish bumps into a net, does the fish tries to force its way through the net and get caught or does it try to stay away from the net.

Also, there is a big difference b/w the floating ocean gill net than the river gill net.
The ocean net's openings actually open wide because of the weighted bottom.
On the other hand the river nets I've seen are stationary and real slopy. It seems like the river nets are not as affective as the floating ocean nets.

The bottom line is I want to get some kind of statistics from river netting. Like the percentage of fish bypassing the Indian nets.

Thanks

I think you'll be hard pressed to find any statistics on how fish behave when approaching a net. I tried a couple of google searches and did find some information, so you might try that. It will probably require a lot of reading to find it, but you may find what you're looking for. If I had to take an educated guess, I'd say that they probably try to swim through it when they encounter one. I say this based on the shape of salmon and their ability (or lack of ability) to move once the head comes into contact with a gill net. If the fish "see" the net prior to contacting it, then there's probably a 50/50 chance that they will attempt to avoid it. I think once the head of a salmon makes contact with the net it's committed to either moving forward or thrashing from side to side. Either way the fish becomes gilled since salmon really can't back up like people can.

I can't imagine finding anything regarding a study of fish behavior, but if you do please share a link if it's on the net!

We could speculate all day, but I do know that in a purse seine, where the mesh is small and the thread coarse, fish will avoid running right into the mesh unless they get spooked. They'll mill around and eventually start running up and down the length looking for a way out.

I would imagine that in a river, if they don't see the mesh, they'd pour on the juice as soon as they felt something and that would be the end of 'em. If they see it they'd probably try to go around it, but at top speed, which just increases the chance they'll run into it somewhere else.

Steelhead do see nets in the day in clear water - I've watched them swim around them myself. But most gillnetting is done at night, probably for this reason and because most steelhead run at night. Gillnets are way too effective and way too non-selective, the fish that are caught aren't worth shait compared to the value of a sport caught fish, and they don't even return to the economy what our state taxes paid to raise the fish in the hatchery. Gillnetting is an archaic practice that should be opposed at every opportunity.

In response to your post, spawnout, are you familiar with a location to find stats on bycatch for drift gillnets (not to be confused with drift nets) in AK, particularly?

Yes, I realize that bycatch reports are only worth something if stuff is reported (that's why they call them reports! )

I would have thought that the deep water fisheries (Tree Point, and Point Baker in S.E. Alaska, for instance) would be fairly selective, as there really aren't that many fish other than salmon that high in the water column that I'm aware of. Just curious...