Inside the heads of subsidised environmentalists

I have no intrinsic interest in vendace at all. I certainly couldn't pick one out in an identity parade. Line one up alongside the IPCC's Pachauri, or Call Me Dave, and which is the fishiest?

I wrote about the vendace here after The Telegraph's copier-out of environment press releases was taken to task by commenters on her article, who noted she hadn't mentioned that the Environment Agency had done something of the sort before.

So I asked the Environment Agency why they were doing it again - something their press release had curiously omitted.

Here's their statement in reply in full, copied and pasted, so the spelling etc is theirs. The bold, however, is mine. The question is not where to start in pulling this apart, but where to stop. It's a sunny day, and readers may enjoy exploring the environmentalists' mindset for themselves, with just some signposts to guide them on their breathtaking journey. Enjoy.

We have already put vendace from Derwentwater into Sprinkling Tarn and that fears around water quality and pollution in Derwentwater were among the drivers for this. However, we were also conscious of the climate change benefits that Sprinkling Tarn brings due to it being higher up and therefore colder. These fish were introduced in December 2005 and will now be sufficiently large to catch in nets - previously they would have been too small to recapture so we couldn't be sure that they had established successfully.

Ideally we would have waited until we had checked that this introduction had been successful before introducing more vendace into Sprinkling Tarn but a number of factors influenced our decision to act now rather than wait any longer. First, the Cumbria floods of November 2009 deposited large amounts of silt into Derwentwater, covering parts of the lake bed in silt which can reduce spawning habitat quantity and quality and / or prevent their eggs hatching successfully. If climate change results in an increased frequency of these extreme weather events then we could see a rapid decline in vendace numbers in the lake such that we may not be able to catch enough fish to carry out a future translocation.

Secondly, recent studies have shown that Bassenthwaite Lake is likely to warm up to such an extent in the future the cold (deep) water that vendace need to survive the summer could all but disappear, if the same happens in Derwentwater then vendace numbers may decline here as a result of this too. Finally, vendace were transferred as newly fertilised eggs in 2005, the lifestage at which survival and therefore successful population establishment is least likely.

Given the threat that vendace are under in Derwentwater we felt that we could not afford to wait any longer to carry out a second translocation. If we left it any longer then we ran the risk of being unable to catch enough vendace broodstock in Derwentwater to enable a transfer. And, because previously transferred fish will only now be large enough to recapture in the tarn and were introduced very early on in their lives, we cannot be sure that the previous introduction was successful.