We (the Eastern Shore Bassmasters) recently placed about 600 pounds of knobbed whelk shell piles into McGinnis pond. Myself and another Division of Fish & Wildlife employee, marked those areas with white and blue striped poles. Some of you frequent flyers may have noticed. A few weeks later I went back to fish them and I could not detect anything. I then went as far as to snorkle on them so I could get a sub aqueous photo of the structure for Cathy Martin's Go-Fish project manual. Guess what I found. Nothing. Almost no shells were visible on either site. They had promptly sunk down into the silt provided by runoff. Mind you, this is a pile of shells about 2.5 feet high. Get the picture?
My bottom line is these ponds need to be dredged or they are just going to fill in. Which leaves me to the temptation to just forget about the shells altogether. I also pondered the thought of just adding more to each site, as it can only sink so far. In short, the above photo is the substitute for the awesome underwater photo I was trying for to show the couch shell that's not really there.
Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.2
No comments:
Post a Comment