Here the Brown Trout Spawn in a primordial dance of ecstasy as the female lays her eggs while the male covers them with his sperm. A beautiful coming together and promise of new life to come. Brown trout spawn between the months October to December and the female starts by scraping a clearing in the gravel in which to deposit her eggs in which the make fertilises with his sperm. Trout and other fish need clean gravel and well oxygenated water in order for their eggs to survive and grow into new fish.

The trout is a fish it’s easy to take fore-granted, especially in Shetland where they are abundant, but all over the ‘developed’ world water quality is deteriorating with one of the primary sources of pollutant being agricultural run off when excess nutrients from artificial fertilisers get washed into the water ways from the surrounding land, the two primary pollutants being nitrates and phosphate. Increased nutrients in the water can result in increased algal growth, which starves the water of oxygen, blocks out the light and covers the bottom with algal slime, setting up a negative cycle which can lead to Eutrophication- death of a water by over enrichment.
In this drawing these two fish dance their dance of life that they have been doing for millennia, and in some areas the populations of trout will have been there thriving since the last ice age. It’s a tragedy beyond tragedy that within a very short time all over the world our water has been polluted, changed and used as dumping grounds, creating a carpet of death that carries the other than human life with it. Water is so important to all life including ourselves, for Without water there is no life, but still, we use and abuse it. Here these two fish are surrounded by encroaching nitrates and phosphates and the algae is starting to multiply, but still, they dance in that elemental urge to come together in the creation and continuation of life.