How to bleed a fishes air bladder

Brownfish03' post='1239' date='Jan 21 2008 said:

JigNJon taught me another way to do this the other day on SH. He took the needle and put it down the fishes mouth through the crunchers....then, lightly put pressure on the inflated area of the fish......you could hear the air rush out of the fish and could notice how the fish was now "deflated". That trick seemed to work really good!

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I think this is what you are talking about Dale... I found it on another site.



There is a new method, well new to me anyway, for bleeding the fish's air bladder. It is much easier than trying to align fins and spots on the side of the fish and it works for all species. With the fishes mouth open, place a #16 hypodermic needle, attached to an open syringe body directly at the upper part of the throat muscle. There is a small yet visible indention or crack at the top of this muscle. Slide the needle approximately 1/4" max into the throat. Be certain the needle is SLIDING not puncturing the muscle! Lower the fish under the water to see that the air is being released properly. This new technique is MUCH easier and a lot less invasive to the fish than previous methods. Keep in mind that there are vital organs in this area and that if done incorrectly, it could be lethal to the fish. This applies to all methods for bleeding the fish's air bladder. Also, it should be noted that this method, while much simpler and easier is not yet recommend by many fisheries biologist. I have also included a picture of the standard method that is the accepted and recommended method.

I could not count the times a few buddies and I have been standing in waist deep water deflating bladders at tournament weigh in releases. Many tournaments that just don't care about your fish will not take the time to deflate bladders, especially if they don't use release boats. They don't care because they don't live there. Flipper has one of the best equipped release boats I have ever seen and he uses it every Sunday Morning in his tournament and he has anglers that assist in the weigh in watching the fish in the release tanks for bladder difficulities and they deflate the bladders while the fish are in the tanks and make sure they are all healthy as possible before release. The tanks are filled with lake water by pumps 1 hour before the weigh in and then the chemicals are added to help promote slim coats, sedate the fish so they don't hurt themselves in the tanks and also adds salt and peroxide to help with any infections the fish may have.

Now when out of town big events show up to fish a tournament they will rent Flippers release boat and his crew do do the fish care because we have ways of making them feel very unwelcome if they think they are just going to throw the fish back in the lake without care being given. More and more of the larger tournaments are bringing release boats with trained personel on them these days. I guess we finally got our point accross down this way that we plan on protecting our fish.......

http://www.724outdoors.com/Fishing/article...iArticleID=1574





here ya go Countryboy. Scroll to the bottom.



Through the mouth is how I always fizz my bass. It works perfect and never had a problem with it. I never want to make an outside wound as some techniques describe.