Dace have spread their fins

I’ve been fishing in the River Barrow recently and catching quite a lot of dace, writes Dick Warner. 

They’re an interesting fish with an interesting back story. They’re not native to Ireland but, unlike most of our introduced species of freshwater fish, we actually have a lot of information about when and where they arrived and how they spread around the country.

In 1889 a party of English anglers used the mail boat and the newly built railway through Cappoquin to go on a pike fishing holiday on the Munster Blackwater. The speed of the new steam transport system allowed them to bring small, live fish with them from England to use as baits for the predatory pike — this is an illegal method today but it wasn’t at that time. Among the small fish were dace and roach, neither of which had been seen in Ireland before. At the end of their holiday they tipped the left-over baits into the river, where both species thrived.

For decades roach and dace were confined to the Blackwater and its tributaries. The roach were the first to escape. Of course, they didn’t manage this on their own. They were transported to the new waters by coarse anglers, which is completely illegal. And they proliferated. Today, fifty or sixty years after the first illegal stockings, they are abundant in at least eighty percent of suitable freshwater habitat in the thirty-two counties.

Dace are a smaller fish and not quite so popular as a coarse angling quarry so they remained confined to the Blackwater until the early 1990s. Then they started to appear in widely scattered locations around the country — a small river system in Co Clare that drains into the Shannon estuary, the Lower Shannon itself in the Limerick area, and the rivers Nore and Barrow in the south-east. There are anecdotal reports of them from a number of other rivers but most of these have not yet been verified by fishery biologists.

The reaction to this has been mixed. Coarse fishermen who fish for pleasure and match fishermen have generally welcomed them because, although they’re not large, they tend to be plentiful and relatively easy to catch. Pike and perch anglers are also quite pleased because dace provide an ample source of food for these predators. But the fishery authorities have labelled them invasive aliens and game anglers tend to dislike them because they believe, probably with some justification, that they compete with trout and salmon parr for limited food resources.

I’m not going to get involved in that row. All I will say is that I’ve fished the Barrow all my life, on and off, for game fish, predators and general coarse fish. In recent years the arrival of the dace has added a new dimension to this fishing. I really enjoy long trotting a float down a briskly flowing stretch of river.