Implementation of Fish Ecological Surveys in Consideration of the German Animal Welfare Act

Modern water management considers more strongly the protection of freshwater eco systems, even human activities still intervene in many ways. To monitor the effects of these activities more and more fish ecological surveys take place. The performance of such field studies requires a direct handling of living aquatic organisms, such as lamprey and fish. While in the fisheries the catch and handling of fish is done to ensure the food supplies, the goals of fish ecological surveys are to protect and support aquatic ecosystems with all their inhabitants. In this context the German Animal Welfare Act has to be considered to avoid stress, pain or suffering even to aquatic vertebrates. For example the catch of fish for monitoring purposes, the tagging of specimen to follow there migratory tracks or behavioural observations due to ethohydraulic tests in model flumes need to be permitted by veterinarian authorities. For this behalf it is important to know the relevant regulatory frameworks which require a high qualification of the experimenters and ask for detailed information about the experimental setups. Furthermore a reasonable justification of the necessity of the experiment is needed and it takes great efforts to refine the methods or to replace them with more tolerable procedures. Last but not least it is essential to reduce the number of the required specimen. On this note it is appreciated that an increasing attention focuses on the protection of aquatic vertebrates in the context of fish ecological field studies.