Scientists: Remove dams

‘Free-flowing’ river crucial to fish, society says

By KATHERINE WUTZ
Express Staff Writer

See the dozens of unique artificial fish habitat models, fish attractors and fish cover used at fishiding.com, the industry leader and only science based, man made and artificial fish habitat, proven to provide all fish with cover they prefer to prosper.

The world’s largest organization of fisheries scientists has added its voice to the chorus of conservationists calling for the removal of four dams on the Lower Snake River to speed the recovery of wild salmon and steelhead.

The Western Division of the American Fisheries Society, an organization whose mission is to protect fish habitat nationwide, passed a resolution on Monday that called for the federal government to take a more proactive stance on removing the dams.

“If society at large wishes to restore Snake River salmon, steelhead, Pacific lamprey and white sturgeon to sustainable, fishable levels, then a significant portion of the lower Snake River must be returned to a free-flowing condition,” the resolution states.

The dams are under fire because of their role in blocking salmon and steelhead runs and increasing mortality of fish travelling to and from spawning grounds in the Columbia River basin and beyond. But according to the Bonneville Power Association, the dams are necessary to meet demand for electricity throughout the Pacific Northwest in peak seasons.

See the dozens of unique artificial fish habitat models, fish attractors and fish cover used at fishiding.com, the leader in proven science based, fish protection.

Tilapia meets cannabis

September 18, 2019
By Matt Jones

A rendering of what Stewart Farms facility when phase 4 is completed.

After spending years developing indoor vertical farming facilities for Alberta-based Nutraponics Canada, Tanner Stewart was convinced aquaponics would be a perfect fit for his home province, New Brunswick.

But shortly after purchasing a 100,000-sq-foot facility in St Stephen to start Stewart Farms, he abandoned leafy greens and instead sought to pair tilapia with a newly legalized crop that represents a growing sector of the Canadian market: marijuana. Read more about artificial fish habitat at fishiding.com

“I’ve had a long-term relationship with cannabis, well over a decade” says Stewart with a laugh. “I love the potential of cannabis in the medical world, I love its health-and-wellness potential and I just have an immense passion for the world of cannabis as a whole. It wasn’t a matter of me not liking the idea of farming leafy greens anymore; I may go back to that someday. But I love cannabis more.”

Marijuana is one of the most valuable crops in the world. Materials published by Stewart Farms posit that there are too few producers focused on growing medical-grade organic cannabis free from herbicides, pesticides and synthetic nutrients. As such, an aquaponics facility growing tilapia and marijuana seemed a good fit. Stewart Farms is in phase 1 of development, where work is contained in a small section of the building as they await their license to grow marijuana from Health Canada.

“After we’ve done phase 4, in the next 30-36 months, 200 metric tons of tilapia will come out of one side of the building and four stories of cannabis production racking will go on the other side,” says Stewart.

Tanner Stewart is combining experience in aquaponics and his passion for cannabis into Stewart Farms, which will grow tilapia and marijuana

Reducing risk
The two sides of the business will be kept separate with a decoupled system, where the water and materials moving through the system are not automatically moved from one side to the other.

Stewart says that coupled systems, such as the one he ran for Nutraponics, work. But such system requires compromises regarding pH levels and water temperature.

“By going with a decoupled system, we get to completely isolate the fish farm onto itself and isolate the cannabis farm onto itself. And we don’t have to make compromises, which I think is pretty important.” He believes that treating the two components of the farm as two separate businesses that share a waste stream reduces the risk. “Under no circumstances would you want one or both of your businesses working under a compromised situation that could affect yields or quality of plants,” he says.

While Stewart is confident the license to cultivate weed will be granted without a hitch, he is less certain about achieving organic certification for the farm. He describes Stewart Farms’ process as “all-organic and non-synthetic,” but acknowledges that organic certifications for aquaponics can be a contentious issue.

Read original article here

Our newest, ultra dense, shallow and first ever artificial fish habitat arrangement in a reclaimed plastic barrel, holds hundreds of separate pieces of never before seen cuts and profiles of 100% reclaimed PVC habitat. We’ve found a way to display and ship our most robust habitat creations, tighter and tougher for the fish! Seven inches of thick concrete hold things together in the base and heavily weighted in the bottom of the barrel, standing up in all conditions.

Each completed Barrel habitat is unique and one of a kind, just like we find in nature. Colorful, abstract and always welcoming, fish gravitate into the thousands of individual crevices provide within the intricate and ever changing, detail.

Large footprint and extreme weight hold these towering creations in one place forever. Installation is a breeze. You can simply drag or carry them with the incorporated handles, or use a two wheel dolly cart. Once in the boat, pontoon or on the dock, you can roll them around on edge and push it into the water. It stands up no matter what, on slopes and current areas. Taller, heavier and wider options are always available, contact us today to talk about your ideas and goals.

Barrels full of fish, hiding spots and ultra dense cover, hit the water for 2021 with unmatched variety, complexity and unlimited flexibility. Ready to sink in minutes, no assembly, materials or additional tools needed, roll into water to and fish!  Unlimited variety available, more sizes coming soon. Ask us about making your own custom size, shape, and included materials to design your own barrels just for your lake, dock, pond or river frontage.

These new shallow water barrels hold a myriad of hand selected cuts of reclaimed PVC, creating an entire refuge of protection inside.

Weighing just over 150 pounds each complete, they stand 48″ tall and open to a seven foot diameter.

The barrel base is 20″ in diameter and stands almost 8″ tall, full of strong cement.

The reclaimed barrels offer a sturdy and durable container that can be rolled on edge with ease.

Two included cotton rope handles, allow user to slide, lift or pull them off the dock or boat once in position. 

For extreme current applications, the entire barrel can be dug in and planted like a bush, never to move from it’s original position. Coming three on a pallet, they get shipped right to your door, ready to be unfolded and HOUSE FISH THE DAY THEY ARRIVE.

When considering fish habitat, I think we need to discuss the role artificial fish habitat can serve. They’re being used more and more, especially in large southern reservoirs devoid of important structure fish need. Fish managers have traditionally placed bundles of Christmas or cedar trees on the lake bottom to provide cover for fish. Because the lifespan of tree bundles and brush piles is limited, replenishing them has always been an ongoing and expensive process.

One advantage of artificial habitat structures that help explain their growing popularity is that they don’t decay or deteriorate. But can “anything” man-made be placed in our waters and be called fish habitat? If we throw a rusty wheelbarrow into a lake today and catch a fish on it next week, can we genuinely say we’ve added fish habitat and therefore improved the lake? Are we unknowingly turning our lakes into landfills or the equivalent of the town dump under the guise of creating fish habitat? Is it really true that any structure of any kind is better than nothing? If you’ve ever wondered if there’s any discernible line between “junk” and authentic fish habitat, you wouldn’t be alone.

If there’s any hope of understanding the potential benefits using artificial fish habitat might offer, I think we need to uncouple two terms: Fish habitat and fishing. Effective fish habitat needs to protect young fish too small to be of interest to anglers. The metric to evaluate how useful fish habitat is must be re-calibrated. The question shouldn’t be how many trophy bass did you catch this year on the habitat, but how many young-of-the year bass survived the brutal gauntlet of their first year of life because of the protection that habitat provided. It could be argued that the most successful fish habitat would be one that only attracted age 0 fish and was a lousy fishing spot.

As anglers, we need to modify our point of view. Fish habitat should be regarded as an investment in the hope of a better day’s fishing in the future, not something with instant payoffs today. If fish habitat isn’t a vehicle for fish recruitment, what good is it? Today, there isn’t a single designer of any artificial fish habitat that doesn’t promise their product or design will protect young fish. These are merely assertions that haven’t met their burden of proof. These claims must be demonstrated before we have warrant to accept them as true. Where is the evidence that any assemblage of man-made parts and scrap material does anything to help even a single fish survive its first year, let alone to adulthood?

So far, Fishiding.com is the only design that has continuously and consistently documented in hundreds of underwater pictures and videos over the years the efficacy of their product.

If you work in the fish management sector, you should absolutely demand evidence that whatever artificial habitat you’re considering spending resources on legitimately works. As condescending as it may sound, intuition or gut feeling is not evidence. If we’re not more careful about scrutinizing and properly evaluating artificial fish habitat, we run the risk of unknowingly crossing what should be a distinct line between what authentic habitat is and what’s simply junk.

BRIAN PEARSON Idaho Department of Fish and GameFeb 20, 2020

BOISE — The Idaho Fish & Wildlife Foundation is accepting applications for its 2020 grants cycle. The grants program provides funding on a competitive basis to nonprofit organizations and governmental organizations.

The foundation is especially interested in projects that align with the foundation’s mission. Grants up to $10,000 per project are available. To qualify, projects generally address one or more of the following areas: Read more about habitat here at Fishiding.com

• Habitat Conservation: Projects that aid in the protection, restoration or improvement of habitats.
• Fish and Wildlife Management: Projects that apply management principles to protect or enhance fish and wildlife.
• Conservation Education: Projects that help educate Idahoans of all ages about the state’s wildlife resources.

This year, the foundation will award $5,500 to fund a special grant with an emphasis on fish conservation and fish habitat restoration in honor of the Lonesome Larry Project.

The deadline to apply is April 30. Recipients who qualify for funding will be notified and announced by Aug. 31 for projects to be completed by Dec. 31, 2021.

Application forms and guidelines are available on the foundation’s website.

For more information, contact IFWF at 208-334-2648 or email ifwf@idfg.idaho.gov. 0 comments

Full original story here:
https://magicvalley.com/outdoors/nonprofit-wildlife-group-offers-up-to-k-grants-for-habitat/article_75ac4f10-4011-5b80-bb62-768ca7e563ac.html

The Science behind Fishiding Artificial Fish Habitat (part 10 of 10): By David Ewald and Eric Engbretson

Part Ten: Putting it all together-Top takeaways from our ten part series:

• Protection is the key: If the habitat structures are designed and installed in a way that don’t reduce the attack to capture ratio, they provide no benefit for forage species and consequently won’t hold any fish at all. Effective fish habitat must be constructed with a labyrinth of pockets and retreats that are completely inaccessible to larger predators.

• Fish are much more discriminating than we would ever have imagined. Because of that, every aspect of Fishiding habitat structures has a purpose or utility that the fish have shown us they prefer.

• Our research shows that fish prefer complex designs that resemble natural elements like macrophytes or coarse woody habitat-They shy away from assemblages that look foreign and out of place.

• There’s a real distinction between form and function. For artificial fish habitat to have any legitimate purpose at all, it needs to be genuinely functional and cannot just occupy space on the lake floor. Does your artificial habitat provide fish with shade, cover, safety, refuge, and food as well as natural habitat does?

• It’s important to have a good understanding of the target lake’s topography, recruitment history and bio-chemical character. This will ensure that the habitat is placed in a location where it will be best used and where the employment of additional habitat would serve a purpose beneficial to the fish.

• Artificial habitat units located in very close proximity to each other, always outperform single units standing alone. Fish will treat the combined individual units as one large, meandering reef.

• Because we can never really get into a fishes head and our own intuition about what should work is unreliable, testing is imperative to physically see what the fish prefer. There’s no substitute for being in the water with the habitat and seeing it with your own eyes. It gives you the most complete picture of what’s happening within the habitat and how fish are relating to it.

• We have all been thinking much too small. The challenge is not to make something that may function as well as a new Christmas tree, but to have higher aspirations, daring ourselves to design and deploy the kinds of habitat that Mother Nature herself will approve.

• Fish Habitat Mats. Simply put, they’re immovable, modular, habitat platforms that an array of habitat components can be secured upon/inside in limitless configurations. They can be carried, rolled or slid around quite easily during assembly, but become virtually immobile once on the lake floor. Hundreds of pounds of safe, dense cover can be secured in one secure cluster. The Mats will create extremely large complexes of cover, breaking a size barrier that has been previously limiting. Now, the dimensions and proportions of the habitat complexes can be measured in yards not feet. They can be as large as you want them, creating the kind of genuine fish-holding habitat that up until now has been unimaginable. We finally have a way to create credible artificial rivals to large pieces of coarse woody habitat, sunken timber, dense beds of vegetation and other kinds of habitat that nature ordinarily provides.

• To improve effectiveness and cost, the habitat needed to be larger, taller and heavier than anything previously considered or produced. These are the factors that shaped the decisions that lead to the design of the new Modular Habitat Mats by Fishiding.com.

Designing and building effective fish habitat is a genuine science. It’s still in its infancy, but we’re learning a great deal every day about the nuances of design and deployment. With today’s deep interest in artificial fish habitat, we’re eager to share our findings with fisheries professionals who want to learn more.

If you’ve missed any part of this series you can catch up at https://structurespot.com/
For more information contact David Ewald at (815) 693-0894
Email: sales@fishiding.com

Part Nine: Modular Habitat Complexes as Large as City Blocks

As we better understand how to create and assemble habitat components that work best together, we now also see the need to scale the overall complex size accordingly. Habitat installations are vulnerable to all kinds of unique forces underwater. Installation of multiple habitat pieces in one collected group, is now the accepted best practice. Especially in public waters, it can be difficult keeping these individually weighted components all together on the lake floor. Fishing pressure, strong currents, and weather events are just a few causes that can move habitat. To properly install vast amounts of fish habitat and have it permanently remain in a group, a fully engineered and pre-weighted modular attachment system was needed. It also needed to be simple to use, requiring no special equipment, tools or experience. Finally, to improve effectiveness and cost, the habitat needed to be larger, taller and heavier than anything previously considered or produced. These are the factors that shaped the decisions that lead to the design of the new Modular Habitat Mats by Fishiding.com.

Although many different prototypes, designs and sizes of these new mat configurations have been created, none had yet been installed into any of our test waters. As decisions were being made regarding final product sizes, weights and models to begin to offer, a call came in from Laura Salamun, the owner of Point View Resort on the famous Lake of the Ozarks. “Fishing is our thing and it’s important to our resort guests”, she told us. “We want to have them catching fish non-stop, all year long.” This was just the challenge we needed to assess the full scale delivery, assembly and installation of 20 different mats of various configurations. This was a perfect opportunity to test the new Habitat Mats against many of the key metrics: This is a fishing resort with almost constant fishing pressure from shore to over 25 feet off three different floating docks. It’s located on a large public reservoir with stiff current, substantial slope, year-round boating pressure and unpredictable weather events.

A customized layout and set of habitat plans were designed and approved to best accommodate the resort guests and their favorite fishing areas. Mats were specifically designed, selected and placed in spots that would best serve the present fish species. Would our delivery, assembly and installation work as planned?

We had put the time in underwater studying the fish. By scuba diving and recording their interaction with various habitat materials over years, we knew the fish would gravitate into the newly designed complex and stay. The 20 individual mats, habitat models and supplies were shipped down and carried by hand onto the floating docks for assembly and placement. Some mats were completely finished and ready to slide into the water, while others had additional habitat materials attached to them on site to create even more complexity. No cable, rope, wood or brush was used, keeping the entire system snag-free and long lasting.

Today’s video highlights the ease and scale of the Habitat Mat installation at Point View Resort with 20 separate, single level Mats. In the near future, these Mats will be installed in an array of considerably larger sizes, and unique shapes that will weigh thousands of pounds combined. Mats will be stacked into multiple three dimensional layers, creating permanent rooms, tunnels and floors, all built solely for fish habitation. Imagine a kind of underwater housing boom including roadways, parks, grocery stores and schools. Modular complexes each a city block in size and two or three stories tall. Islands of cover linked together for relaxing, hunting or hiding. A fish oasis. Fishiding.

Designing and building effective fish habitat is a genuine science. It’s still in its infancy, but we’re learning a great deal every day about the nuances of design and deployment. With today’s deep interest in artificial fish habitat, we’re eager to share our findings with fisheries professionals who want to learn more.

If you’ve missed any part of this series you can catch up at http://www.structurespot.com
For more information contact David Ewald at https://www.fishiding.com
Phone: (815) 693-0894
Email: sales@fishiding.com

Part Eight: A Revolutionary New Design

In recent years, many new types of artificial fish habitat and various fish attractor styles have been installed from coast to coast. State agency fish managers and the fisheries industry as a whole, are using them to strategically enhance cover where natural habitat is at a premium. Although becoming very popular, numerous installers have reported some unanticipated problems. Because many current designs are fairly lightweight, they can be easily movable if not heavily weighted with additional materials. Once deployed, some models are prone to tipping over, sliding or being pushed around by wind, current and weather events. Boaters can inadvertently catch them on anchor lines, dragging them far from designated locations. Fisherman with strong braided lines can haul them up with this heavy gear. We’ve even heard reports of fisherman who find the attractors and move them to their own secret “honey holes”. Carefully marked GPS coordinates of where the structures were placed and should still be may be becoming less and less reliable, as installed materials get dragged away from the initial installation site.

Fishiding Habitat has been addressing these concerns throughout their product line, including the introduction of the new patent pending line of products called Fish Habitat Mats. Simply put, they’re immovable, modular, habitat platforms that an array of habitat components can be secured upon/inside in limitless configurations. They can be carried, rolled or slid around quite easily during assembly, but become virtually immobile once on the lake floor. Hundreds of pounds of safe, dense cover can be secured in one secure cluster. The Mats will create extremely large complexes of cover, breaking a size barrier that has been previously limiting. Now, the dimensions and proportions of the habitat complexes can be measured in yards not feet. They can be as large as you want them, creating the kind of genuine fish-holding habitat that up until now has been unimaginable. We finally have a way to create credible artificial rivals to large pieces of coarse woody habitat, sunken timber, dense beds of vegetation and other kinds of habitat that nature ordinarily provides.

Today’s video takes us to the Point View Resort on Missouri’s sprawling Lake of the Ozarks. Fishiding.com recently placed twenty separate Fish Habitat Mats, all outfitted with a variety of their habitat models and various PVC components. The Habitat Mats are designed to provide cover and protection for fish, along with improved angling opportunities for the resort’s fishing guests. The massive complex comprised of dozens of different models of artificial habitat, is believed to be the largest and most sophisticated of its kind ever used in a single location. We have known for years that to create a real fish magnet that’s stable, permanent and holds vast numbers of fish, it needs to be heavy and it needs to be big. The new Habitat Mat system recently placed in Lake of the Ozarks is colossal in scope. It’s a sophisticated fish-friendly habitat framework that was designed to grow aquatic life and make a real footprint on the lake floor, attracting and protecting substantial numbers of fish.

The largest pieces tower from the lake floor some 16 feet creating underwater skyscrapers for fish to use as refuge. In total, the assembled complex weighs over 7,000 pounds and creates over 8,500 square feet of surface area. Other resorts, including the Point View as well as individual homeowners on Lake of the Ozarks, have for decades placed cedar trees or brush piles into the lake attempting to attract fish. Recent flooding and storms washed away virtually all the existing fish habitat that was previously placed at the Point View Resort. The Fishiding Reclaimed Artificial Fish Habitat, incorporated and anchored to the newly installed Fish Habitat Mats, have the kind of permanence and stability that fish managers have been asking for.

Designing and building effective fish habitat is a genuine science. It’s still in its infancy, but we’re learning a great deal every day about the nuances of design and deployment. With today’s deep interest in artificial fish habitat, we’re eager to share our findings with fisheries professionals who want to learn more.

If you’ve missed any part of this series you can catch up at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Krzy…
For more information contact David Ewald at https://www.fishiding.com
Phone: (815) 693-0894
Email: sales@fishiding.com