A right royal success for innovative fish castles
There’s an old saying that a man’s home is his castle.
We don’t know if that’s true but we’re certain that our new fish castles in Victoria are providing native fish with much-needed homes.
Working with local businesses, organisations, and the community in Gippsland and across Victoria, OzFish volunteers have been restoring habitat in Lake King to provide fish and shellfish with environmentally friendly homes.
Using recycled scallop shells, donated through the Nature Conservancy’s ‘Shuck Don’t Chuck’ program, volunteers have been creating habitat structures that will provide native fish with an important source of shelter and food.
“We call them fish castles,” said Ben Cleveland, Senior Program Manager with OzFish.
The project is supported by the recreational fishing community and funded by the VFA Recreational Fishing Licence Trust Fund and BCF – Boating, Camping, Fishing. Once completed the project will see 250 fish castles installed in Lake King.
The shells are collected from local fisheries, restaurants, and businesses in Melbourne, then cured for a minimum of six months to ensure they don’t introduce contaminants to the waterway.
“We then put them into triangular mesh frames, more than four feet long, constructed thanks to the efforts of the local Twin Rivers Men’s Shed. The triangular shape has been tried and tested, through other OzFish projects, to be more attractive to fish, oysters and other colonising species as they prefer angular surfaces because they allow less build-up of mud and sediment.
Once deployed into Lake King, near the mouth of the mighty Tambo River, the fish castles help to create complex habitat for native fish populations, like the black bream, that the lakes are so famous for. The natural shells not only help to attract new shellfish growth, such as mussels, but also provide a home for the small creatures, like shrimp and crabs, that help to form the bottom of the food chain.
These provide juvenile fish with a valuable source of food and the fish castles’ complex maze of hiding places provide shelter from predators.
The fish castles have been deployed by boat to the same area as other large woody habitats recently installed by the East Gippsland Catchment Management Authority.
“This will further increase the fish habitat complexity in the area and add to the fantastic work of the EGCMA.”
“We’d like to thank everyone who has been involved in successfully delivering this project so far, including the EGCMA, Gippsland Boat Storage, and Kina Diving,” stated Ben.
To complete the construction and installation of the new fish castles, OzFish will be holding volunteer days in the near future. Stay tuned to our events page and social media channels for more information on when those will be.