|
I usually check stomach contents on the fish I catch. I don't know that it helps me catch more fish but I find it interesting. In warm water fish digest their food fast, I'd guess after a 1/2 hour you'd have trouble making a visual ID. If you really care or need to know you can count vertebrae or fins spine. The pen and beak of squid stays intact much longer than the body will. Crustacean and shelled mollusks are identifiable for much longer. I caught a YT last month on a surface iron cast in to a school of nervous sardines. The YT had squid, smelt, and juvenile rockfish in it's stomach but no sardines. That seamed kinda strange to me. In college I helped a grad student friend collect the stomach contents of bat rays. There was a oyster farm operation in Humboldt Bay that was killing bat ray under the belief that the rays were eating their oysters. They would find where the rays had been rooting around in the oyster beds as well as shattered oyster shells. They had a permit to drag a big trawl over their beds to catch, and kill, the rays. 100s and 100s of bat rays. What my friend found from stomach contents was that the rays did indeed eat oysters, but not too many. Their main food items on and around the beds were actually rock crabs and blood worms. The crabs and worms are both big predators of small oysters. The rays were actually helping the oyster farm by removing the crabs and worms and the company immediately stopped the netting. Yay, happy ending. Mike
|