John Langley: an artisan fisherman of the Northern Rivers region

 

A large wild Australian bass, caught in the freshwater reaches of an East Coast river. Caught in late March (early autumn), on a lure with a barbless hook, this female fish was making her way down to the estuary for winter spawning. She was carefully released after the photo. [IMAGE: Codman at the English Wikipedia, 19 March 2007, retrieved 26.11.23]

ABC News, 26 November 2023:

John Langley still makes and sells hundreds of fishing lures each year.  (Hannah Ross)

Necessity is the mother of invention, and in 1949 John Langley was in dire need of some fishing lures.

Then aged 17, he was working for his grandfather feeding the pigs on the banks of the Richmond River, and the waterway was brimming with bass.

He had with him his father's oldest and best two lures.

"I didn't want to lose them because they were so old so I decided to try to make a lure," he said.

John Langley spends many happy hours in his workshop at Geneva, near Kyogle in northern NSW.(ABC North Coast: Hannah Ross)

Like a scene from Huckleberry Finn, the lad used his pocket knife to strip down some willow limbs and fashioned old jam tins into some bibs that seemed to do the job.

"I sort of went on from there," he said.

The precious lures that once belonged to John Langley's father inspired his own designs.(ABC North Coast: Hannah Ross)

All for the love of it

Now 91, Mr Langley continues to handcraft and sell his lures, reeling in customers to his stall at the monthly Kyogle Bazaar market.

He charges $10 for a lure, with an output of up to 50 lures a week.

"It's just a hobby, I don't intend to make a real roaring business out of it," he said.

"I know I'm selling them cheap but I don't care, I just like making them."

To perfect his lures, Mr Langley has spent a good part of his life trying to think like a fish.

Each lure is hand-painted and tested to ensure it's ready to fool even the most canny fish.(ABC North Coast: Hannah Ross)

He meticulously hand-paints each lure with automotive paint in colours that will appeal to each species, taking into account what time of day they are being used.

He said a male bass, for instance, would attack a lure painted in the same colours as itself, thinking it was warding off a rival for its territory

"You can go fishing with a lure in the morning and catch a heap of bass on it, then go for a cup of tea," he said.

"When you go back, you have to find another colour. They know.".....

Wherever he goes fishing, his lures attract attention and buyers contact him to send them more.

His creations are now being cast into rivers and seas across Australia, Europe, the United Kingdom and Japan....

Read the full article here.

The Great Barrier Reef is a nursery for Queensland & News South Wales fisheries and we are still failing to adequately protect its coral structure and marine biodiversity

"Healthy coral reefs are among the most biologically diverse and economically valuable ecosystems on earth, providing valuable and vital ecosystem services. Coral ecosystems are a source of food for millions; protect coastlines from storms and erosion; provide habitat, spawning and nursery grounds for economically important fish species; provide jobs and income to local economies from fishing, recreation, and tourism; are a source of new medicines, and are hotspots of marine biodiversity." [UCSanDiego, Scripps Insitution of Oceanography]

Go to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation website and you be presented with links to a "Kids Corner", visual tours and various 'projects', some of which were unrealised or unsuccessful.

A website visitor will also find that the foundation has not published online an annual report since 2018 - the year the Turnbull Government announced that this small foundation was to receive $443 million dollars in federal funding.

However, it did publish the Annual Work Plan 2019-2020.

The Foundation rarely rates a mention in the mainstream media these days. 

This is the latest news report is from The Guardian on 11 July 2020:

The Great Barrier Reef Foundation has raised only $21.7m out of a target of $357m in donations more than two years after it was awarded the largest single environmental grant in Australian history. 

It has prompted Labor to call for greater transparency from the foundation about its fundraising, while the Greens have said the figure “makes a mockery of the government’s logic” for awarding the grant. 

The charity controversially received $443m for reef projects in 2018, with the government defending its decision at the time by saying the private foundation would leverage the funds to attract further investment in reef restoration and science from the private sector. 

The foundation released an investment strategy in October 2018 that set a target of $357m to be raised over five years, bringing the total reef investment to $800m.  
The target is made up of $200m in contributed funds from research and project partners, and $157m in cash donations from a capital campaign ($100m), corporate giving ($50m) and individual donations ($7m). 

In response to questions from Guardian Australia, the foundation said it had raised $21.7m in in-kind donations from research and project partners, about 6% of the total $357m target. 

It has raised none of the $100m from the capital campaign and refused to provide any figures to show how it was tracking towards targets for corporate giving and individual donations. 

A spokeswoman said the Covid-19 pandemic had now “made the fundraising environment more challenging and uncertain for many not-for-profits across Australia and around the world”. 

In-kind contributions are non-cash donations, which a foundation spokeswoman said included things such as a farmer donating time to work on a water quality project, or a project partner supplying equipment such as a boat. 

“Cash is what we need to fund science projects and offer grants for community projects,” said Peter Whish-Wilson, the Greens senator who chaired a parliamentary inquiry into the awarding of the grant. 

“The kind of funds they’re seeking, yes it’s potentially lumpy and can take time to raise. But I would have thought they would have at least $50m to $100m by now. 

“It makes a mockery of the government’s logic and intent giving nearly half a billion of taxpayer money to a small private foundation on the basis they would raise dollar for dollar co-contributions from the private sector.”.... 

“Our fundraising target was $157m, of which $100m was to support the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program which was launched in April 2020,” the foundation’s managing director, Anna Marsden, said in a statement to Guardian Australia. 

“With this program now finalised and as per the strategy outlined in the collaborative investment plan, fundraising revenue is expected to start to be realised from the third year of the partnership.” 

However, the investment plan states the foundation had intended to raise 60% of that $100m across years two (2019-2020) and three (2020-2021) of the strategy. 

The foundation refused to answer questions about how much it had raised of the remaining $57m made up of corporate giving and individual donations. 

The foundation’s spokeswoman told Guardian Australia there had been some donations in these categories but the organisation would not be supplying figures.....

Read the full artcile here.

BACKGROUND


https://youtu.be/E1BvLMhQLZA 

Drone footage captures tens of thousands of sea turtles off Australia's Great Barrier Reef

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 29 June 2020: 

Literally cooked in hot water—what happened in the latest mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.... 

Coral bleaching is no longer rare, and no longer confined to a few tidal pools. 

Instead, mass coral bleaching, in which many reefs are affected, has now occurred on the Great Barrier five times in the last 23 years. Three of these events were within the past five years, most recently in the summer of 2020. Bleaching is happening much more frequently, and much more intensively. My colleagues at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, James Cook University, and I—along with many others—have been studying these coral bleaching events in an effort to find out more about what factors are driving corals to bleach, whether the Reef can overcome them by itself—and what humankind can hope to do to help the corals. The findings, so far, are bleak—even more so than when I first wrote about coral bleaching for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2016.... 

Corals are most at risk of such thermal stress in high summer, when water temperatures are at their local seasonal maximum. 

They live only 1-to-2 degrees Celsius (about 1.8-to-3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) below their threshold for heat tolerance, so unusually warm waters over a matter of even just a few weeks is sufficient to cause them to bleach.... 

Different coral species respond to thermal stress differently, with the fast-growing branching corals more susceptible, and slower-growing massive corals more tolerant. The appearance and makeup of coral communities after severe bleaching becomes flatter and less diverse as the corals responsible for the complex three-dimensional structures succumb more readily to heat stress. 

There are obvious follow-on effects to the reef-associated organisms which rely on live, healthy corals for their survival. Restoring a reef to its healthy pre-bleaching state is possible but it takes time: time for surviving corals to regain their algal partners and continue to grow; time for coral larvae to be produced on the reef or be imported from nearby unaffected reefs. 

About 10 years without disturbance is required for such recovery and this is just not happening on the Great Barrier Reef. Since 1985, a unique long-term monitoring program has regularly assessed the condition of a subset of reefs. Measurements of the amount of hard coral cover show that the Great Barrier Reef can recover from disturbances such as bleaching, tropical cyclones, Crown-of-Thorns Starfish outbreaks and diseases but that there are limits to their ability to bounce back; overall, there has been a widespread ratcheting down of coral cover. Almost every part of the Great Barrier Reef has suffered some major environmental disturbance in recent times. 

And there is nowhere for the corals to hide.....

Read the full article here.

February 2020 - a month of fish kills and fish rescues in New South Wales

In the 2008 fish kill, North Creek was habitable and provided safe haven for many fish.

Doesn’t look like that’s going to happen this time. pic.twitter.com/RkNAAKxDp7

— Keith Williams (@Captainturtle) February 17, 2020

The Northern Star, 18 February 20120, pp 1-2:

Dr Matt Landos, a local veterinarian who specialises in aquatic species, recently warned of a potential fish kill. 

He previously said the long, dry spell had led to a build-up of monosulfidic black ooze in agricultural drains within the catchment. The drains were built long ago to empty wetlands to open land to farming. 

On Sunday, he took his son to North Creek to find his prediction had come true. “Nineteen years on from the first major kill, and the science on drainage and wetland restoration sits largely gathering dust, waiting for action to fix our landscape,” he said. 

“The solution is to pay our farmers to restore drained wetlands.” A spokesperson for the NSW Department of Primary Industries said DPI Fisheries had investigated fish death events at Rocky Mouth Creek and North Creek. 

“Mullet, bream and whiting are the main species impacted, the spokesperson said.“The suspected cause of the current events is due to critically low dissolved oxygen levels.”

Earlier in the month on 7 February at Fine Flower Creek in the Clarence River catchment there was a report of approximately 150 to 200 dead fish including Mullet and Perch. Likely cause being low dissolved oxygen within an isolated pool receiving minimal inflows.

Further down the coast on 11 February at Clybucca Creek in the Macleay River estuary there was a report of thousands of dead fish including Garfish, Mullet, Blackfish, Silver Biddy, Flathead, Bream and Whiting. Recent rainfall events have caused flooding of the backswamp system resulting in deoxygenated and low pH water, killing fish upstream and downstream of the gates.

That same day at Killick Creek, Kempsey, there was also a report of thousands of dead fish including Yellowfin Bream, Mullet, Longtail Eels and Flathead. Stressed fish were observed gasping at the water surface indicating low dissolved oxygen levels present. Cause was episodic rainfall events that caused short and sharp flow. This can cause a rapid reduction in dissolved oxygen levels due to large volumes of organic material entering the river system.

On 5 February Cockle Creek at Teralba, Lake Macquarie there was a report of  hundreds of dead Mullet. Likely cause being low dissolved oxygen within an isolated pool receiving minimal inflows.

16 February at North Creek, Prospect and Chickiba Lakes at Ballina saw a report of thousands of dead fish including Bream, Leather Jacket and Trumpeter. Cause unknown.

By 18 &19 February the Richmond River had suffered two fish kill events. The first at Woodburn Bridge when hundreds  of mullet died due to the reduction in dissolved oxygen (DO) levels caused by significant rainfall/flooding event on floodplain, followed by hot weather, leading to discharge of large volumes of critically low DO water entering the waterway via creeks and drains.The second at the East Wardell Boat Ramp with a report of hundreds of dead fishing including Bream, Flathead, Garfish, Whiting, Mullet, Herring ranging from 10cm to 40cm. The cause was a reduction in dissolved oxygen (DO) levels caused by significant rainfall/flooding event on floodplain, followed by hot weather, leading to discharge of large volumes of critically low DO water entering the waterway via creeks and drains.

Also on 19 February at Alumny Creek, South Arm and Shark Creek in the Clarence Valley there were reports of thousands of dead fish including mullet and eels, due to the reduction in dissolved oxygen (DO) levels caused by significant rainfall/flooding event on floodplain, followed by hot weather, leading to discharge of large volumes of critically low DO water entering the waterway via creeks and drains.

A total of 24 fish kill events occurred in NSW coastal catchments in February 2020, while there were 6 fish kill events in the Murray-Darling Basin involving the death of many hundreds of dead wild fish.

See: NSW Dept. Primary Industries (DPI), Fish Kills in NSW for full details.

In order to save as many fish as possible from the record-breaking drought, bushfires and post-fire water pollution after rainfall, rescues have taken place in the Gwydir, Border Rivers, Macquarie, Lachlan, and Upper Murray catchments in the Murray-Darling Basin, and in the Clarence and Richmond River catchments on the coast.

Threatened fish species were captured and relocated to areas where these fish would have a greater chance of surviving or sent to government hatcheries and Taronga Western Plains Zoo where they will form the backbone of captive breeding programs.

DPI Fisheries states it has rescued more than 5,000 native fish from all corners of the state, since operations began in September 2019 with the rescue of Murray Cod, Golden Perch and other native fish species in the drying Menindee Lakes.

Those fish rescued to date include: approximately 1,630 Olive Perchlet, 740 Southern Pygmy Perch, 292 Oxleyan Pygmy Perch, 107 Southern Purple Spotted Gudgeon, 98 Eastern Freshwater Cod, 79 Silver Perch and 34 Eel-tailed Catfish and, sadly only 9 Macquarie Perch.

Community members are encouraged to report sightings of threatened fish to help identify where actions may be required to prevent fish deaths and, to report any fish deaths or observations through the Fishers Watch phoneline on 1800 043 536. 

For more information or to report a threatened species, download the FishSmart app, phone the Fishers Watch phone line on 1800 043 536, or visit www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/fishing.

Has Australia lost another species to climate change?

The Guardian, 15 February 2020:

Drought, bushfires and rainstorms turn Australian rivers black

Luke Pearce had arrived at Mannus Creek for a three-day mission to rescue the Murray-Darling Basin’s last population of Macquarie perch.

For 10 years Pearce had visited this spot on the edge of the Snowy Mountains that, just weeks earlier, was ravaged by fire. There had been rain and the creek was flowing fast.

But as Pearce and his colleagues stood on the bank – nets at the ready – the water turned “to a river of black porridge”.

“We got there at about midday with two teams. But we were too late,” he says.

Pearce is a fisheries manager in the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries. A week earlier, he had caught nine of the endangered perch and taken them to the tanks at Narrandera Fisheries Centre.

But Pearce says nine was not enough to be confident they could breed enough in captivity to replenish the river. About 100 specimens would be be ideal, but Pearce says the fish are in such low numbers that he was hoping for 20. Hence the rescue mission on 20 January.

“It was a front of black water coming down,” Pearce says. “The water was pretty bad to start with, but it went from green to inky black.

“It was a moment of complete despair and, really, a feeling of a missed opportunity. Maybe if we’d got there four or five hours earlier we may have been able to get one or two more.”

An electronic probe in the water monitoring the oxygen levels dropped to show zero within hours, Pearce says.

“Watching those oxygen levels drop like that I had grave fears we could have lost all the fish in that system. It was devastating having worked there for such a long time to then potentially lose all this.”

The river was too black to see any fish, but crayfish, shrimp and mayfly larvae were crawling out.

What happened at Mannus Creek is one example of what scientists have described as a “triple whammy” hitting rivers on Australia’s east coast and inland.

Drought and a long-term drying has delivered a cascade of mass fish kills since late 2018, with low river flows, low oxygen and algal blooms. Authorities and politicians warned repeatedly in 2019 that ongoing drying would see more mass fish kills.

Then Australia’s bushfire crisis struck across catchments. Now heavy rain has washed sludge and ash into rivers, robbing the remaining fish of oxygen.

Hundreds of thousands of fish have died in multiple events – some caused by lack of water, and some caused by downpours running over burned catchments.

At one time, Macquarie perch was one of the most abundant native fish in the Murray-Darling system – prized by anglers and also commercial fishers.

But a NSW government assessment of the fish in 2008 wrote the building of dams and weirs had compromised spawning areas and blocked the fish’s movement. Overfishing, pollution and predation by introduced species like redfin perch had also caused numbers to plummet.

When Luke Pearce returned to Mannus Creek after the fires he was confronted with a scene of carnage. Photograph: Luke Pearce

Read the full article here.

Bushfire ash & debris as well as drought now killing fish in NSW coastal and inland rivers

"Fish kills are defined as a sudden mass mortality of wild fish. In NSW we are likely to see further severe fish kills across coastal and inland catchments during the summer of 2019/20....Fish can be directly impacted during fires through extreme high temperatures, loss of habitat, or be threatened from rapid declines in water quality if rainfall occurs in recently burnt areas. Run-off from rainfall events can wash large amounts of ash and sediment into rivers following fires, causing rapid drops in oxygen levels and threatening the survival of fish populations." [NSW Dept of Primary Industries]

The upper reaches of the Clarence River have been badly stressed by low water flows since 2018, so when bushfires began to eat their way through the severely drought affected Clarence Valley in mid-2019 it was obvious that the rolling impacts wouldn't stop when the fires diminished or when rain fell.

There has been a fish kill at Big Fish Flat, an area known for the protected eastern freshwater cod now only found in parts of this river system and commonly known as Clarence River Cod.

The most likely cause of this kill is bushfire ash entering a river which has all but ceased to flow - turning what water there is into a toxic brew.

At Baryulgil on the Clarence est. 1,000 fish died due to low dissolved oxygen within an isolated pool receiving minimal inflows due to drought conditions.

There was also a fish kill on the Mann River, a major tributary of the Clarence which reportedly coincided with ash in the water.

Two fish kills were experienced to the north at Emigrant Creek at Tintenbar in the Ballina Shire and the Brunswick River near Byron Bay - possibly due to low dissolved oxygen within an isolated pool and minimal freshwater inflows. 

Another fish kill occurred to the south on an 8km stretch of the Macleay River where locals describe the bushfire ash and burned debris turning that river's water into a thick sludge killing hundreds of thousands including Australian Bass, Bull Trout, Freshwater Mullet, Eel-tailed Catfish and Eels.

The Guardian, 17 January 2020: Results of a fish kill in the Macleay River in northern New South Wales, which locals said was like ‘cake mix’. Photograph: Larry Newberry

Similarly bushfire affected water ways in the NSW-Qld Border Rivers system appear to have been similarly affected by run-off from the fire grounds and reported fish kills there are being investigated.

All in all a total of 23 coastal and 17 inland NSW waterways have experienced small to large fish kills to date during the 2019-20 bushfire season.

More fish kills predicted along the Darling/Barka River

The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 March 2019:

Residents at Menindee are bracing for a fourth mass fish kill in the Darling River in about three months, as a new paper finds water savings in the Murray Darling Basin may be just one-tenth the amount modelled.

The NSW Department of Primary Industries has warned the arrival of a cold front after another heatwave in the region this week posed a "high risk" of another bout of widespread fish deaths.

Possibly millions of fish, mostly bony herring but also endangered perch and Murray cod, were killed in the three previous events. A sudden drop in dissolved oxygen levels - as blue-green algae died and began decaying - was the prompt for the previous fish kills.

"They're super-stressed. It takes less [to kill the fish]," Graeme McCrabb, a Menindee resident, said on Tuesday. "The numbers of golden and silver perch and the cods got less [during each die-off]."

Separately, a report published in the Australasian Journal of Water Resources by John Williams and Quentin Grafton from the Australian National University found the $3.5 billion spent on water-saving infrastructure - such as concrete canals - may have saved 70 billion litres a year compared with the federal government's estimate of more than 10 times that figure.

Professor Grafton said their analysis showed the average cost of water recovery could be as much as $50,000 per megalitre returned to the Murray-Darling Basin every year, or about 25 times more expensive than buying the water back from willing sellers.

The key issue is the failure to measure and account for so-called return flows - the leakage of water into aquifer that ceases when irrigation becomes more efficient.

"It's a travesty for all Australians," he said. "You've spent billions of dollars and you've not measured what you've got."….

There isn't enough water in the Darling River system to avoid catastrophic outcomes

Australian Academy of Science, media release, 18 February 2019:    

Scientists lay out new plan to save the Darling River

  

https://youtu.be/TkpRsY81FIg

Scientists asked to investigate the fish kills in the Murray-Darling River system in NSW say a failure to act resolutely and quickly on the fundamental cause—insufficient flows—threatens the viability of the Darling, the fish and the communities that depend on it for their livelihoods and wellbeing.

The multidisciplinary panel of experts, convened by the Australian Academy of Science, also found engagement with local residents, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, has been cursory at best, resulting in insufficient use of their knowledge about how the system is best managed.

The scientists say their findings point to serious deficiencies in governance and management, which collectively have eroded the intent of the Water Act 2007 and the framework of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan (2012).

Chair of the expert panel, ANU Professor Craig Moritz FAA, said the sight of millions of dead fish from the three fish kills was a wake-up call.

“To me, it was like the coral bleaching event for the mainland,” Professor Moritz said.

“Our review of the fish kills found there isn’t enough water in the Darling system to avoid catastrophic outcomes. This is partly due to the ongoing drought. However, analysis of rainfall and river flow data over decades points to excess water extraction upstream.”

The expert panel recommends that urgent steps can and should be taken within six months to improve the quality of water throughout the Darling River.

“That should include the formation of a Menindee Lakes restoration project to determine sustainable management of the lakes system and lower Darling and Darling Anabranch,” Professor Moritz said.

The panel also recommends a return to the framework of the 2012 Murray Darling Basin Plan to improve environmental outcomes.

“The best possible scenario is water in the Darling all the way to the bottom and in most years. We are hopeful that this could be achieved if the panel’s recommendations are implemented,” Professor Moritz said.

Australian Academy of Science President, Professor John Shine, said the scientific advice of the expert panel is a synthesis of the best available knowledge.

“In undertaking this body of work the multidisciplinary expert panel has collaborated with other relevant experts as required and received extensive data from a number of Federal and State agencies,” Professor Shine said.

These agencies include the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, the Land and Water Division of the NSW Department of Industry, the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, the NSW Department of Primary Industries, the Queensland Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy, and the Commonwealth Environmental Water Office, in addition to data and information provided by researchers in many related fields. The expert panel wishes to acknowledge the cooperation of these bodies and individuals in promptly providing data.

The expert panel also operated closely with the Independent Panel to Assess Fish Deaths in the Lower Darling, initiated by the Government and chaired by Professor Robert Vertessy, including sharing data and a reciprocal review of findings.

The expert panel report

Read the report: Investigation of the causes of mass fish kills in the Menindee Region NSW over the summer of 2018–2019

The main findings and recommendations are in the executive summary. The report was independently assessed by seven independent peer reviewers, including one international reviewer.

Related media releases

Academy to provide science advice on fish kill (21 January 2019)

Panel of experts to review fish kill announced (23 January 2019)

Academy welcomes independent assessment of fish deaths (23 January 2019)

Wealth of data triggers revised reporting date for Academies’ expert advice on fish kills (7 February 2019)