Loch's age-old species of fish

Loch Lomond is a location renowned globally for its unique beauty but perhaps not so well known is its number and variation of fish species which have inhabited the loch at various times over the past century.

- BY SILVER INVICTA

The loch has long held a reputation as one of Scotland's finest salmon and sea trout fisheries but historical records give evidence that over various periods of time there has been as many as 20 different fish species inhabiting the great loch.

Alfred Brown, the first secretary of the Loch Lomond Angling Improvement Association (LLAIA), was an angler but also a knowledgeable naturalist and he wrote a paper 130 years ago in which his research showed that at one time Loch Lomond was an arm of the sea and therefore could have been termed as a sea loch similar to the Gare Loch or Loch Long.

He concluded in the prose of that time that: "It is the presence of a considerable assemblage of such fishes which constitutes the chief feature of the Loch Lomond fish and fauna, and one may search Scotland in vain for a similar concourse of species".

He went on to conclude that there were "no less than fifteen species" which he considered may have been indigenous at that time and by adding the game fish of the loch there was a total of 20 species resident in the loch at that time.