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Junior Member
I have been fishing quite a few night tournaments on Herrington and I have noticed that some of bigger fish being caught are dying because they can't swim down after they are released. Last night i brought a 5.5 lb bass home that a guy had caught. He was floating so i brought him home and put him in my aquarium. He acted like he was going to come back but he died though. So i thought i would ask here if anyone knew where to get a needle and how it is done. This is not the only big bass i have seen floating at the marina the next day after a tournament. This really bugs the crap out of me and i feel is intolerable, very unsportsman like, and unprofessional. The guy that caught that fish did feel terrible but said he didn't know how to bleed the bladder even if we did have a needle. Please provide mature comments on this only.
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Senior Member
If you go to Google, type in "fizzing a fish or bass" there are a ton of articles on it.
Just a question to all those out there who run tournaments big or small, do you offer to fizz a bass for someone at weigh-in?
Senior Member
I was at the Renegade Tourney Saturday night at Nolin and I will have to say that Sherbert Vanmeter and a couple of other guys worked really hard to save some fish. I have never seen someone work as hard as Sherbert to keep these fish alive. Several of which they fizzed, or what ever you want to call it, and seemed to do well at it. After seeing what changes it made in a lot of the fish I started to research it really hard the past few days. There are several really good articles and a couple of studies on fizzing fish. Here are four links on fizzing fish and other information. The best one is the last article because it describes several precautions needed to keep tourney fish alive, not just Fizzing fish.
If you are just catching and release, fun fishing, from what I have read there is NO NEED to fizz a fish, they will return to the depth they need to. The problem is not something that happens in minutes but over several hours. From all of the articles I have read one thing I have learned is it is not the actual air bladder pressurizing that causes the need to Fizz the fish. They swim every day of their lives vertically in the water column with no ill effects from the greater pressure in the air bladder. It is all because they can return to they depth they left. The problem is the STRESS from being in a live well for several hours that makes them too weak and disorainted to return to they depth they need to.
I am going to learn how to fizz fish and think everyone should, but I would be reluctant to use it unless I observed the fish for some time.
Well that is my opinon good or bad right or wrong and hope this helps.
www.mnr.gov.on.ca/MNR/pubs/Fizzing.pdf
www.ladybassangler.com/id28.htm.
http://focusedfishing.com/blog/?p=79
www.leggettscreekbassmasters.com/conservation/Keeping%20Bass%20Alive.pdf
Fizzing Kit can be purchased at
www.iovino.com/fizzkit.htm
Junior Member
All the big fish i have caught have been floating on their sides from the time i put them in the livewell until they are released. I thought the floating was from the air bladder
Senior Member
No that was because of the dynamite, LMAO, sorry man just had to say it....Originally Posted by CraigGipe
Senior Member
i use to have this problem when fishing deep water for crappie. i started useing heaver line and take my time reeling them in. dont know if they got a case of the bends or not but it did help them when i slowed down bringing them to the boat.
Junior Member
I checked all the weblinks and they all show a method of going in through the side of the fish. At BASS tournaments they go through the mouth. So i just called Chris Bowes with BASS and he is going to get me some information on fizzing the air bladder going in through the mouth. He also informed me that is the preferred method for fizzing. I will post here what information he provides me with
Senior Member
locate the fin on the side of the fish .go about 2-3 scales back or the width of 1 finger slide the needle in under the scale then stand it up . then push it in with a short quick jab .put the fish back in the tank and gentle sqeeze the air out. if it is in the right place you will be able to see air escape out if not repet process--- it does work as i have saved several fish this way as a tournament director----- to get a good needle you should go to a vetenarian and get a good gauge needle that will work as not to get plugged up --- hope this helps. just trying to put it in laymens terms
Senior Member
Sounds good please relay the info if you do not mind. Would love to read it.
Senior Member
I would recommend that we not stick a needle into the side of fish. Now it might help if you take a small straw like device and insert that into the mouth and into the stomach on some species as in some species there is an air duct between the stomach and the swim bladder. This may help eliminate some of the excess volume inside the swim bladder, maybe.
The main problem with catching fish in very deep water (over 25 ft deep) is that if you bring them up too quick the air that's dissolved inside their blood vessels will out gas and give the fish the bends. The Bends will kill the fish as air bubbles are not good when they form inside the blood vessels. It can cut off the flow of blood in the fish's body.
The only way to correct for the bend or Caissons Disease is to put the fish back under pressure ASAP. With scuba divers they are placed inside a decompression chamber and slowly taken back to a higher pressure and then slowly the pressure is released over time to bring them back to normal sea level atmospheric pressure of 706 mm Hg. This has to happen over some time. The increased pressure forces the air bubbles in the blood vessels back into solution. Then you slowly release the pressure on them over time so that the gas don't come out of solution again.
The amount of gas a liquid can hold is dependent on the pressure on the liquid and the temperature of the liquid according the Boyle's Law and Charles's law.
They should make a something that can attach to the fish and later dissolve away. This could be used to attach to the fish and then to a heavy rock so that you could send the fish back to the right depth. Just make sure you don't send the fish too deep or below the thermocline where there is little or no dissolved oxygen.
A fishing line that would dissolve in a few minutes would work great. Some scientist needs to come up with this system for saving big bass after a fishing tournament.
One poster gets it. He said to bring the fish up to the surface slowly. Give the fish some time to acclimate to the decreasing water pressure as you haul them up to the surface.
Air inside the bladder also expands and makes it harder for the fish to swim back to the bottom or deep water. Sticking a needle into the swim bladder to let out the air may seem to work but more than likely you are doming the fish to a slow death from bacteria infection.
The air bladder obtains the air inside it from the surrounding blood vessels that line the inside of the air bladder. They will allow air to pass though the blood vessels and into the air bladder to help fill it up or shrink it.
And sticking a needle inside the fish may also damage other organs inside the fish. If you puncture a liver or a kidney or the fish's intestines that fish will die later from sepsis.
Now fishing in colder water helps as the increase in water temperature at the surface during the hot summer months helps to increase the amount of gas expansion in both the swim bladder and the blood vessels. Not only are you decreasing the amount of water pressure on the fish but you are increasing the temperature of the fish. The Air Volume of a balloon will increase with increasing temperature and decrease with increasing pressure. So when you bring a fish up to the surface from cold 70 deg F 33 ft deep water you are going to increase the temperature surrounding the fish and decrease the water pressure by 760 mm of Hg or 1 ATM of pressure. That's just too much change for the fish to survive unless you get it back down to the deep and cooler waters.
Another way to get the fish back down is to use a long pole with a grappling device on one end and a trigger on the other. Simply grab the fish by the lips and stick the pole back down to the deep water and then release the fish in the deep cool water. That may be the best way to get the fish back into environment where it may survive the trauma of being caught in deep water and hauled to the surface.
If fisherman really want to improve the number of fish in your lakes then hold the tournaments in the spring and fall when the surface water temps are not so hot. Because no one has invented a cheap and quick system that can save a deep caught fish in the summer time.
I'd like to see some more research on this subject. For example if the fizzing works then a fish caught in deep water during the hot summer months could be placed in a huge aquarium and watched for the next few weeks to see if it survives or dies. If bacteria get inside the fish's body it may well die. But we can't know for sure without watching the fish for a few weeks or days after the fish has been punctured by a dirty needle.
I took a few classes in bacteriology and have worked with bacteria in the lab ever since I was in high school advanced biology class. I took microbiology in college and have worked in a laboratory for a few years culturing bacteria and conducting water quality testing for surface waters and drinking water. There are a lot of bacteria even in drinking water and a lake water is full of different types of bacteria.
Just wiping the slime coating off the fish's scales can give it an infection later.
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