144 x 1/2 = 72

But of course the Mancs are better than us so it takes 288 of them to make 72

I did a bit of aproject on burbot a few years ago and I get the feeling our rivers will be too warm for them to breed.

I believe they breed when the water is almost zero degrees

very very cold indeed!

But saying that I would love to see them back, 30lb burbot would make a great target fish

As Lee says, burbot thrive in very cold water and perhaps the best waters for them, both running and still, would be in Scotland.

But I guess some of the game fishahs wouldn't like that. Not even if they were told that burbot taste better than smoked salmon.

I beleive that burbot (Lota lota) are still present in waters on the continental mainland of Northern Europe.   They've not been caught in the UK for many years, although I do know an angler who lives near me who once caught one from a Yorkshire River.

K Mansfield in the Art of Angling (1957) suggest the UK burbot was becoming scarce by 1900.  Peter S Maitland in Key to British Freshwater Fishes writes that there were only six recorded captures between 1960 and 1972 in the UK.  The noted authority on UK fish species, Tate Regan wrote that the largest recorded specimen was an 8lb burbot from the Trent.

It would be interesting to see if the species could be reintroduced in to UK waters, although an article this week in the Times suggests that burbot imported from Europe could contain diseases which would damage other species in the UK.

I had also heard that there were plans to re-introduce the burbot...

They may well put some artificially-reared ones in our rivers, but I don't think they will ever breed here un-aided again. I have read they need to spawn under the ice and there certainly aren't many rivers here now which freeze over for long enough for this to happen. Maybe on one of the Northern rivers where it  used to thrive, it might be worth a bash, but I think they are flogging a very dead fish indeed. The last Burbot caught on rod and line in the UK were caught fairly local to me I think (one supposedly on the river Cam near Baitsbite Lock and another on the Old West river at Aldreth(?) during the early 1970's. The EA still have a record of a Burbot being pulled out of the river Rhee at Barrington near Cambridge in the 1970's and I believe Dick Walker and Fred J Taylor (RIP) had a session or two nearby to try to catch one.

Considering how common burbot were a few hundred years ago, it is amazing that they dissappeared so quickly... definitely a sign of Global Warming. According to the literature, the fen drains of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk had so many burbot in, that local farmers would feed their pigs on them. These slow waters froze over every year - the fen skaters are well known - but they certainly don't manage to practice there very often now!!! 

As another interesting aside... another name for the burbot is an "Eel-pout" - This caused me to believe I had caught a burbot when I was a kid on holiday at Gorleston harbour... A local told me the fish was an eel-pout. Only years leter did I discover it was probably a local name for a rockling. I think the Angling Times had a reward of £100 available at the time, for anyone landing a burbot.... It was never claimed.

Trev 

Cheers,

Trev 

I wrote some stuff about this a few months back.

What the guy running the breeding programme reckons is it wasn't global warming which did for them.

It was the explosion in road building and car ownership which happened in the 1950s and 60s.

Burbot eggs float. After rain, a film of oil gets washed into river and the scientist reckon it kills burbot eggs, so the chances are they couldn;t become re-established in the wild.

The EA are now on the case, suggesting they wouldn't grant Section 30 consent for them to be reintroduced.

Also interesting was after a piece I wrote about this appeared in some of the papers over here, I was contacted by someone who believes he caught the last on from the Ouse, as a schoolboy fishing at Denver Sluice in the 1970s.

He took it to show the lockkeeper, who identified it.

Chris, I agree with you that global warming wasn't the reason for the disappearance of burbot from UK waters.

Burbot were scarce by 1900, yet global warming was increasing very slowly at that time. There was even a slight decline in global temps in the 40s and 50s because of the rapid growth in burning of coal - carbon particles in the upper atmosphere reduced the amount of the sun's energy absorbed by the earth.  By the 60s global warming accelerated again as more oil was burnt.

As regards Walker and the burbot:

It would be about June 1964 when Walker, together with Fred J Taylor, decided to try and catch a burbot from the Great Ouse. During March of 1964, a Bedfordshire angler had reported to Angling Times his capture of what was strongly suspected to be a burbot. It was somewhere near Olney and the fish weighed around 10 lbs.

Walker put the feelers out in a big way regarding this fish and even discovered the swim it was allegedly taken from. Of course it would be an incredible feat if Walker could catch a fully authenticated burbot.

He came down to Little Hill Farm one June afternoon whilst I was staying at the hut. He spent some time catching minnows to use specifically as burbot bait and I helped him. From what I remember he was all fired up about the burbot and thought they might be the reason for the big fish that had been hooked recently on the middle Ouse that were breaking away. In actual fact these fish turned out to be barbel as Chevin and Chuck Nunn found out.

But Dick never caught a burbot and the subsequent events to that very exciting period have been forgotten in the mists of time.