Videos & Installation Instructions
Note: Once fish habitat is dropped into the water, displacement largely removes the effects of gravity on the base objects like the vinyl limbs, making them almost "float in space". PVC fish habitat pieces that hang down and lay on the ground above water will rise up with set in memory in pvc materials. Pinching the bend with your fingers will set that shape into the material and keep it pointing that way underwater, there is no wrong shape. It takes less than five minutes to un-fold and shape each model/unit by bending with only your fingers.
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Set the fish crib base and fish habitat units on tailgate or small outdoor table for easy bending at waist height. Folding limbs over themselves and allowing them to intertwine creates ideally abstract openings fish thrive within. Each habitat unit should be a maze of angles, crevices and openings, only tiny creatures can hide within and limbs sticking out that hold predators in wait. See set up videos and pictures on our website, or www.fishiding.com/videos-installation for more help.
Most models have a maximum height when leaving a few limbs sticking straight up, un-bent. With shallower conditions or even more density, simply bend all the limbs down at various angles. This will shorten the overall height of the habitat structure, but not complexity and surface area. Safehouse, Palace and Cradle models work exceptionally well at all heights between 12"- 48" without breaching surface.
Cradle, Briar, Bunker and HighRise pucks and tops:
Remove the tie and let limbs open up and relax. Move around the base container as you bend the limbs in various directions. Multiple pieces/limbs can be bent together, sending them off in different directions. Leave some limbs standing un-bent in the center of unit for maximum model height, or bend to stay just under the water’s surface at your desired depth. Add second bends to multiple pieces for additional dimension and textures.
For Smallstake and HighRise tops, leave a few limbs standing un-bent in the center and crease the others in various directs to create desired shape and maximum model height. These can be bent two or three times each for maximum diversity. Install the Smallstakes by wading or dropping in shallow water, placing in groups. The HighRise tops seem easiest to work with when pre bent and shaped first, then screwed on the base by hand with the incorporated plastic fittings.
The Bunker model needs very little bending. Pinch the material above the twist tie and slide it off the end to remove it. This seems easier than un-twisting each one. Let the fine strands simply dangle off the side of the base and bend the two tips of each U-channel limb in different directions. This unit can be set in place by hand or dropped in from a boat.
Safehouse, Keeper, Palace and HighRise Bases:
The Palace and Safehouse units have no internal trunk and can be bent from all directions. After selecting a few limbs in the center of unit to stay un-bent for maximum unit height, grab a limb near the center and pull it through sideways, folding it over itself. This helps to open things up and send limbs in directions other than straight out and down. Crease each bend with your fingers to set bend in material. Move around the base, bending each limb different ways to fill any open areas. Limbs then can be bent a second or third time to point where you want and add more hiding spots. bending limbs on angles adds rigidity to keep shape and angle under water. Set units in place on dry lakebed or simply toss off the boat into your lake or pond.
The Keeper and HighRiseTM bases are very similar with a few exceptions. Leave the trunk sections supporting the Vertical UpRiseTM and bend the limbs all around it. The pre-bent tops then can be installed onto the base by hand and dropped into the deep water. The HighRiseTM bases have a scrap piece of 3" tile set into the puck plug for shipping and protection. This small scrap is to be removed before snapping puck into the wye fitting on the base.
The self-opening models simply install directly out of the box with no needed bending at all. Both the Ultra Fine Cradle and the Fortress have fine strands in the middle of the unit. These can be bent at various angles to expand and "primp" the appearance if desired. Although any of our models can be made even more intricate by bending some or all of the pieces in various directions, they are great for saving some time. These models currently include the 54" Stakeout model, The Fishadow, the Ultra Fine cradle and the Fortress. You can't do anything wrong, experiment with different shapes and styles.
The newly created ShleafsTM that come in the kits may need some attention after removing from the boxes to stand them back up straight before setting into cement. Re fold the material to re-set the 90 degree crease we put into the flat sheets with your fingers. Simply fold the piece of material along the pre-creased line, retaining the set memory into the PVC habitat piece. The last foot or two are left un-bent, adding just the perfect shaded surface area and vertical element.
Here's the most recent under water video we have of our fish cover and fish habitat complex. This fish structure or habitat complex has been in this lake for over ten years. Eric has been filming and learning the different species of fish in his lake and how they are relating to our artificial fish habitat products. Even with a myriad of natural elements in this northern Wisconsin lake, the fish have always treated the artificial fish trees, bushes, grasses and stumps like natural cover as habitat. We would never have this unique glimpse and understanding of fish; preferences, without Underwaterfishphotos.com sharing the secrets of
Part One: How They Work Fishiding Artificial Fish Habitat isn’t designed in and of itself to attract game fish. Instead, its purpose is to provide indispensable cover for juvenile and YOY fish. It’s this congregation of juvenile and forage fish that interests game fish. Other artificial fish habitat models attempt to attract larger piscivores, but because they lack the intrinsic tight spaces and crevices to provide real protection for juvenile fish, game fish don’t develop any allegiance to these structures. Imagine an open McDonald’s restaurant with no fresh food available. Customers may stop by, but they won’t stay. Conversely, Fishiding habitat presents a perpetual 24/7 buffet of potential available forage, but they ensure that adult centrarchids still have to work to eat. If the habitat structures are designed and installed in a way that don’t reduce the attack to capture ratio, they provide no benefit for forage species and consequently won’t hold any fish at all. The key is protection. Artificial structures must be complex enough microhabitats to afford genuine fortification for small fish. In the evaluation of other types of artificial fish habitat, this is the most critical and most often overlooked aspect of design. Effective fish habitat must be constructed with a labyrinth of pockets and retreats that are completely inaccessible to larger predators. One of the things that separate Fishiding Artificial Habitat from other designs is the amount of research that has gone into observing the units after they’ve been deployed in the lakes. We spend hundreds of hours a year photographing, filming and observing how fish respond to various designs. We’re constantly testing and discarding design aspects that serve no function or purpose while enhancing other elements that we’ve learned are preferred by the fish. Through constant observation, we can determine which features are important to fish even if we don’t yet entirely understand why. It turns out that when it comes to accepting artificial habitat, we’ve discovered that fish are much more discriminating than we would ever have imagined. Because of that, every aspect of Fishiding habitat structures has a purpose or utility that the fish have shown us they prefer. We don’t merely guess at what we think the fish will like. We actually let them tell us. In this sixty-second time-lapse video recorded over thirty minutes of real time, you can see the abundance of life that surrounds the Fishiding habitat. Once deployed, Fishiding structures quickly become assimilated into the environment by developing thick organic growth both on the panels and in the center cores. Several units placed closely together form a complex mosaic of habitat. As you can see, location placement is also important. We didn’t just toss them into the lake. In this instance, we’ve purposefully placed the units where they can be enveloped by a colony of Chara on the lake floor—a great platform to use if you can find it—and away from any other useful, existing habitat. The synergy of this natural element and the dark center core of the structures provides authentic sanctuaries for young fish. A myriad of shady, narrow passageways and small compartments provides an abundance of additional cover. When largemouth bass approach, it’s remarkable to see how effectively and quickly the forage fish are able to employ this cover for concealment. They seem to disappear before your eyes. Fishiding Habitat structures also include some features designed to aid predator fish. Wide panels are bent to provide both vertical and horizontal planes that are cleverly utilized by larger bass as surreptitious ambush stations. In future videos, we’ll show you how bass use these ambush planes and why their exact width and placement are vital. Designing and building effective fish habitat really is a science, and while it’s still in its infancy, we’re learning a great deal every day about the nuances of design and deployment. With so much interest in artificial fish habitat today, we’re eager to share our research findings with fisheries professionals who want to learn more. We’ve come a long way since the days of throwing discarded Christmas trees into our lakes and calling it a day. Stay tuned. In this continuing ten-part series, we’ll show you additional underwater video of how fish utilize artificial habitat and why so many popular designs are completely ineffective. For more information contact David Ewald at https://www.fishiding.com Phone: (815) 693-0894 Email: sales@fishiding.com)
Part Two: Integration There’s no such thing as a single artificial habitat that does it all. That’s why Fishiding habitat comes in various and many different design models. Each habitat model is conceived to achieve a specific purpose or to serve in a specific range of depth. In this time-lapse video, you see several of our “Bunker” models combined with two “Small Stake” units. Every Fishiding habitat is designed to mimic something in nature. When it comes to artificial habitat, our research shows that fish prefer complex designs that resemble natural elements like macrophytes or coarse woody habitat; they shy away from assemblages that look foreign and out of place. Since they mimic cattails, the “Bunker” and “Small Stake” models are best in shallow littoral zones where fish would naturally expect to find such environments. In these locations, they get plenty of sunlight and quickly grow algae. This gives them a fuller and bushier appearance and helps to create more caverns in the interior core that small fish use for concealment. Every Fishiding habitat model provides tight nooks and crannies completely inaccessible to larger fish; this feature ensures genuine protection for juvenile fish. This video shows the seamless integration of the habitat and the Chara that grows on the floor of the lake. It’s always desirable to combine artificial habitat with natural elements whenever it’s possible. When you marry the right artificial structure to natural components, it becomes part of the mosaic of the lakescape instead of intruding into or disrupting the ecology. Even in lakes devoid of aquatic vegetation, other naturally occurring elements can usually be incorporated to add dynamism to the structure. Centrachids are particular fond of these habitats and will orbit them persistently—in exactly the same way they relate to cattails in the lake. For young of the year fish, these structures are homes in a literal sense. They provide essential cover, harbor invertebrates, and give the young fish a good head start. At this time, the other types of artificial habitat available simply lack the complexity to provide these vital benefits. These habitats are often spindly exposed frames and possess nothing that can be used for concealment or refuge. Effective fish habitat must have a labyrinth of pockets and retreats that are completely inaccessible to predators. The most impressive part of this video is what you can’t see. Nearby, and just out of camera range, is a wide assortment of brush piles, coarse woody habitat, rich beds of aquatic plants, and other elements that nature abundantly provides in healthy, vibrant, natural lakes. Even with this Camelot so near, fish still deem our Fishiding artificial habitat worthy of attention. We don’t maintain that artificial habitat is better than natural habitat, but by trying to mimic nature in our designs, we demonstrate that it’s possible to create credible surrogates. Designing and building effective fish habitat is a genuine science. It’s still in its infancy, but we’re learning a great deal every day about the nuances of design and deployment. With today’s deep interest in artificial fish habitat, we’re eager to share our findings with fisheries professionals who want to learn more. We’ve come a long way since the days of throwing discarded Christmas trees into our lakes and calling it a day. Stay tuned. In this continuing series, we’ll show you more underwater video of how fish utilize artificial habitat and reveal why so many popular designs are completely ineffective. For more information contact David Ewald at https://www.fishiding.com Phone: (815) 693-0894 Email: sales@fishiding.com)
Part Three: Taking Cues from Nature Human beings like their world to be tidy, neat, and straight. We mow our lawns to look like the 18th green at Pebble Beach. The rooms in our homes are perfectly rectangular. We even park parallel to each other. On our farms, the corn is planted and grown in flawlessly even rows. Our city downtowns resemble blocks of box-like structures that are uniform, neatly organized, and composed of straight lines. We use levels relentlessly. If something falls askew or deviates from our rigid conception of order, it’s immediately corrected. Nature, on the other hand is all about apparent chaos. Trees and plants left unattended grow in whichever direction they like. There is no symmetry to an oak tree or to a patch of wild blackberries. A walk in a thick forest is kaleidoscopic, filled with seemingly limitless angles and lines in every direction. Nothing appears arranged or choreographed. Ultimately, perhaps, this is how we discern what’s man-made from what’s natural. When we started making Fishiding Artificial Habitat, we realized we had to resist the natural human tendency to make these structures geometric. After all, they weren’t going to be placed on our back-yard patios for friends to admire. Instead, they were going to be used in nature—in wild underwater worlds where the currency of uniformity and precise geometry that pleases our human eyes is worthless and alien. To be fully embraced by the fish they were intended to serve, artificial habitat would have to possess the hallmark of natural design. In short, apparent chaos. Today’s underwater video does a great job of showing you the disordered and untidy non-design of Fishiding artificial habitat. As in a wild forest, you can see how the structures are deliberately created to be random and chaotic. While there are some vertical and horizontal angles, almost all the panels are slanted, twisted, and tilted into a complicated labyrinth imitating coarse woody habitat. The structures offer hidden passageways with dark shadowy hideaways, and they challenge predators with heavily obstructed sight-lines that work to insure the safety and protection of foraging fish. Additionally, there’s a maze of tight spaces that larger fish cannot penetrate. Effective fish habitat must be constructed with a labyrinth of pockets and retreats that are completely inaccessible to larger predators. While it appears that all the advantage goes to forage species and juvenile fish, predator fish like the smallmouth bass in this video patrol the perimeter. They’re able to penetrate some of the interior but have to sacrifice important ambush speed to navigate the maze. This handicap allows small fish to easily hide or escape. While they’re prevented from unobstructed views or making torpedo-like attacks, large bass patiently linger in the open water nearby where outliers might venture to be picked off. The goal is to create low predation risk and reduce the attack-to-capture ratio but not eliminate it entirely. There’s a real distinction between form and function. For artificial fish habitat to have any legitimate purpose at all, it needs to be genuinely functional and cannot just occupy space on the lake floor. Does your artificial habitat provide fish with shade, cover, safety, refuge, and food as well as natural habitat does? We believe this can only be achieved by effectively mimicking the chaotic designs we see in nature. They will always outperform the constructions that look like they would be more at home in our human world than in the home of a fish. Designing and building effective fish habitat is a genuine science. It’s still in its infancy, but we’re learning a great deal every day about the nuances of design and deployment. With today’s deep interest in artificial fish habitat, we’re eager to share our findings with fisheries professionals who want to learn more. We’ve come a long way since the days of throwing discarded Christmas trees into our lakes and calling it a day. Stay tuned. In this continuing series, we’ll show you underwater video of how fish utilize artificial habitat and why so many popular designs are completely ineffective. For more information contact David Ewald at https://www.fishiding.com Phone: (815) 693-0894 Email: sales@fishiding.com
Part Four: Evaluating Performance- When we’re testing a new model of Fishiding Artificial habitat in a lake setting, we always let the fish make the basic decisions. No matter how much we may like a structure we design, if the fish don’t respond to it, it’s shelved. We’re not interested in deploying constructions that masquerade as habitat but do nothing in the lakes. If fish reject them, so do we. There’s no guessing involved. All our habitat is literally fish tested and approved. It can be difficult to determine if fish really like a certain piece of habitat or not. When evaluating the effectiveness of artificial fish habitat, one important metric we use is something we call the allegiance score. In marketing, it’s similar to what advertising people refer to as brand loyalty. Simply put, this means the degree to which adult fish linger in, or hold onto, any particular piece of cover, and how reluctant they are to leave it. This observed behavior is graded subjectively on a scale of zero to five. For example, in the spring, many Centrachids will absolutely refuse to vacate their nesting sites, even when molested. We can say that the allegiance score for the nesting site is 5. Nesting crappies aren’t nearly as immovable in the same situation, so their allegiance score in their own nesting site would be a 3. Catfishes in this same scenario typically score a 4. If we place a piece of habitat in the water and fish swim by it as if it’s invisible, it gets an allegiance score of zero. Basically, we reason that if fish ignore our structures or won’t stage on them, something has failed. We feel that scores of 5 can’t realistically be expected for any fish that’s not protecting fry or eggs. So we’re looking for allegiance scores of 3 or 4. Today’s video gives you a visual idea of the process described. The video shows a single large bass staging on a group of our bunker complexes. Almost immediately, the fish becomes aware of our cameraman approaching in SCUBA diving gear. The bass has every opportunity at this point to flee but remains with the habitat. The bass is approached more closely to determine her allegiance to the structure. By this point, there is some measure of danger to her, and her body language signals some alarm. As we circle her and explicitly invade her comfort zone she turns and has yet another opportunity and a clear path to flee. However, she retains position close to the habitat even in the face of undetermined threat. It’s almost as if she’s tethered to it. We interpret this behavior as a genuine reluctance to abandon this fish habitat structure. We would therefore assign an allegiance score of 4. This tells us that this model is accepted by the fish and is performing as intended. The allegiance score is one of the tools we regularly use to determine if our artificial habitat passes the fish test. In case you think that fish will stage on basically any structure, we can assure you this is not the case. We’ve discovered that fish are much more discriminating than we would have ever imagined. In fact, we’ve tested many artificial habitat models that scored a zero on this test and failed miserably in other evaluations we use to determine performance. These duds (if they were made by Fishiding) were all scrapped. While we don’t do the stringent testing the FDA does on pharmaceuticals, we do like to know if our habitats actually work as advertised. We certainly wouldn’t be using any that didn’t perform exceptionally. Designing and building effective fish habitat is a genuine science. It’s still in its infancy, but we’re learning a great deal every day about the nuances of design and deployment. With today’s deep interest in artificial fish habitat, we’re eager to share our findings with fisheries professionals who want to learn more. We’ve come a long way since the days of throwing discarded Christmas trees into our lakes and calling it a day. Stay tuned. In this continuing series, we’ll show you underwater video of how fish utilize artificial habitat and why so many popular designs are completely ineffective. If you’ve missed any part of this series you can catch up at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Krzy... For more information contact David Ewald at https://www.fishiding.com Phone: (815) 693-0894 Email: sales@fishiding.com
Part Five: Location and placement- After design, the single most important aspect of creating successful artificial habitat that fish will use is location. In testing Fishiding habitat, we’ve spent a great deal of time studying placement and there seems to be three obvious but often overlooked tenets that can make the difference between success and failure. The three aspects concern location, bottom substrate and constellation. 1) Location: Success depends largely on depth. When artificial habitat is placed shallow enough to let sunlight reach them, they can quickly grow algae and other organic material. This serves as a food source for juvenile fish and also makes the structures fuller and denser. If deployed in the littoral zone, they become much more accessible to newly hatched fry that will quickly colonize them and use them for shelter and protection which may help to improve survival rates. When placing any habitat in deeper water, it’s important to know what the dissolved oxygen profile is. If placed in water too deep where DO levels are insufficient, they’ll naturally go unused. Therefore, it’s important to have a good understanding of the target lake’s topography, recruitment history and bio-chemical character. This will ensure that the habitat is placed in a location where it will be best used and where the employment of additional habitat would serve a purpose beneficial to the fish. When we’re testing Fishiding artificial habitat, we’re also mindful of precise placement sites. Placing fish habitat in known fish locations or areas where fish are regularly caught is not a good way to prove their effectiveness. If fish are already congregating under a dock for example, placing any artificial fish habitat in that same location and catching fish, does nothing to authentic their ability to attract fish. All you’re doing is demonstrating that the units don’t seem to repel fish. We prefer to test and evaluate Fishiding habitat in areas that fish aren’t already using. In doing so, we can evaluate whether fish are truly attracted to the newly placed habitat models. When they are, we’ve then created an additional and useable habitat site for them, not unnecessarily bolstering a spot they were already using. 2) Bottom Substrate: To maximize the effectiveness of Fishiding artificial fish habitat, whenever possible, they should always be placed in areas with a hard bottom substrate. If placed on a lake bottom with 12 inches of muck let’s say, any habitat type will sink into the mire and you’ll effectively lose a foot of height. Since the vertical height aspect of fish habitat is critical, you certainly don’t want to diminish that attribute. You also don’t want any part of the construction buried or otherwise covered where it can’t perform the functions it’s designed to. 3) Constellation: Artificial habitat units located in very close proximity to each other, always outperform single units standing alone. Fish will treat the combined individual units as one large, meandering reef. By creating limitless variety in the largest habitat complex you can assemble, the term “bigger is better” truly applies. In addition, by employing multiple units in a single location, you create a mosaic or tapestry of true habitat that amplifies the effectiveness of the entire grouping. Typically, fish managers may want to place fifty structures in ten different locations, comprised of five units each. Understanding the desire to cover as much ground as possible, we encourage you to resist that impulse. Instead in this scenario, create a single giant complex of 50 units all at one site. This creates so much more synergy and dynamism. The more complex and dense the habitat is in any one location, the better, for the fish. Designing and building effective fish habitat is a science. It’s still in its infancy, but we’re learning a great deal every day about the nuances of design and deployment. With today’s deep interest in artificial fish habitat, we’re eager to share our findings with fisheries professionals who want to learn more. We’ve come a long way since the days of throwing discarded Christmas trees into our lakes and calling it a day. Stay tuned. In this continuing series, we’ll show you more underwater video of how fish utilize artificial habitat and why so many popular designs are completely ineffective. If you’ve missed any part of this series you can catch up at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Krzy... For more information contact David Ewald at https://www.fishiding.com Phone: (815) 693-0894 Email: sales@fishiding.com
Part Six: How to determine if your habitat is working- Over the last decade, artificial fish habitat has been placed in hundreds of waters from coast to coast, but astonishingly there has been little evidence provided that they live up to the claims made by their installers. We continue to ask, where are all the pictures, videos or even screenshots from fish finders proving and showing us that they work as well as the advertisements and PR articles claim? Doesn’t the claim of protection for small fish require seeing the small fish inside the habitat being protected? In this series, we felt it was important to provide more than bold assertions and proclamations, and actually show you Fishiding Artificial Fish Habitat models performing underwater. There must be a reason why the industry as a whole hasn’t done the same. It’s fairly easy to assemble some kind of artificial habitat in the garage, stand back admiringly and declare that it’s awesome and will work, but how do you really know that it will? When we observed our various model prototypes underwater in the field, we were often humbled by how little we really understood the needs and behavior of the fish we were designing the structures for. Because we can never really get into a fishes head and our own intuition about what should work is unreliable, testing is imperative to physically see what the fish prefer. There’s four ways of trying to determine if your habitat is working. Each has limitations and drawbacks that should be considered. The most popular and least effective way is to fish around the structure. It can be tempting to declare success, if even a single fish is caught around newly placed habitat. Because artificial habitat is often placed in productive fishing spots to begin with, all that can be said is it doesn’t seem to repel fish. Another method is to try marking fish on a fish finder. The information you can collect with this method is also limited. You won’t see if any organic growth has taken place or if small fish or invertebrates have taken up residence. Larger fish may be spooked by the presence of your boat directly overhead and may not be counted. Underwater cameras lowered over the side of your boat will give you a visual idea of what things look like, but the angle of view is so narrow that it’s never really possible to view the habitat in its entirety. You may miss things just above, below or otherwise out of frame. The last and best method of evaluation is by scuba diving. This is the method we use to appraise Fishiding Artificial Fish Habitat. There’s no substitute for being in the water with the habitat and seeing it with your own eyes. It gives you the most complete picture of what’s happening within the habitat and how fish are relating to it. While we typically film fish underwater by scuba diving, even here, there’s a caveat. We learned quickly that the mere presence of a diver can alter how fish behave. Often fish are attracted to a diver simply out of curiosity. To eliminate the possibility that fish were more interested in our cameraman than the habitat, we needed to film the fish alone to see what they were doing “when nobody was watching them”. That was the inspiration behind setting up cameras to surreptitiously film how fish interact with Fishiding habitat. We also weren’t satisfied with only getting a glimpse of them in a brief period of time, so we set up a time lapse camera. The following video, although only a minute in length, was filmed over the course of hours of real-time. This approach gave us better insight into the amount of traffic that occurred at a Fishiding Habitat site over a longer period of time. We’ve learned so much by watching the fish and we challenge anyone who works with artificial habitat to do the same. It’s this kind of observation that will expand our knowledge, propel the industry forward and give birth to more effective future designs and applications. Designing and building effective fish habitat is a genuine science. It’s still in its infancy, but we’re learning a great deal every day about the nuances of design and deployment. With today’s deep interest in artificial fish habitat, we’re eager to share our findings with fisheries professionals who want to learn more. In this continuing series, we’ll show you underwater video of how fish utilize artificial habitat and why so many popular designs are completely ineffective. If you’ve missed any part of this series you can catch up at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Krzy... For more information contact David Ewald at https://www.fishiding.com Phone: (815) 693-0894 Email: sales@fishiding.com
Part Seven: The Future of Artificial Fish Habitat In studying much of the available online literature written about artificial fish habitat, we’ve noticed a curious thing. Often times, the makers of artificial habitat, both the store bought and “homemade” variety, boast about their effectiveness and performance by comparing them to Christmas trees. Using Christmas trees as any kind of bench mark is a straw man argument. Why compare your structures to something that’s widely considered to be one of the least durable and least effective types of fish habitat? Statements like “habitat X outperformed Christmas trees or they held more fish than Christmas trees” are meaningless. When evaluating artificial fish habitat, we feel that comparisons should be made not to Christmas trees, but to natural elements like 60 foot oak trees or giant white pines that fall in the lakes, huge and gorgeous beds of tall coontail, or bays of dense lily pads and grasses. These are the kinds of fish habitat that truly sustain and provide for current and future fish populations. We all can see how inferior our man made artificial habitat work is, when compared to a full scale, natural habitat. These mega sized and natural objects are the kinds of “real” fish habitat we should all be striving to compete with. Artificial fish habitat should be exceptional or at least really good, not merely good enough. Is the rebuttal simply “Well, we’re just trying to create fish attractors for fisherman, and not really habitat per say”? Creating attractors are a worthy endeavor as well, however, for those interested in creating actual fish habitat, the apparent interchangeability of the two terms often leads to misunderstanding. Over the course of this series about artificial fish habitat, we’ve shown you a great deal of underwater video of Fishiding habitat in action. This time we’d like to show you something very different. Today’s video illustrates what we need to be striving towards when we’re thinking of future artificial habitat projects. This clip shows how nature provides fish habitat in a vastly superior way than we’ve been able to accomplish so far: This large and majestic pine tree weighing thousands of pounds grew for decades on the shore until it was damaged one night in a thunderstorm. When it crashed into the lake, it began a second life as a home to fish, turtles, waterfowl and dozens of other creatures big and small that would come to utilize it. It’s size and complexity is enormous. The root wad remains on the bank with the top of the tree extending 60 feet from shore over a sharp break line. This created both extensive cover, space underneath and around the tree complex, all habitat that fish could utilize. This is what genuine fish habitat looks like….an authentic Camelot for thousands of fish. Let this be your inspiration the next time you think about what artificial fish habitat could be. When we compare this single tree to the typical kinds of artificial habitat mankind has come up with so far, our shortcomings are starkly apparent. We have all been thinking much too small. The challenge is not to make something that may function as well as a new Christmas tree, but to have higher aspirations, daring ourselves to design and deploy the kinds of habitat that Mother Nature herself will approve. Nature and all the creatures above and below the waterline are speaking to us, we just need to listen. Fishiding.com is excited to announce their new line of products for 2019 called Fish Habitat Mats. This modular, fully customizable and self-contained system, could very well change the direction and future of habitat installations as we know them today. Attributes never before seen include gigantic size in all three dimensions, intricate and unlimited complexity, huge underwater footprint and towering vertical height. In the next part of this continuing ten part series, we’ll show you the revolutionary new design that’s recently been placed in Lake of the Ozarks and is already full of fish. This first ever Habitat Mat installation was comprised of dozens of individual habitat structures and is believed to be the largest and most sophisticated of its kind ever used in a single location in a public lake environment. Designing and building effective fish habitat is a genuine science. It’s still in its infancy, but we’re learning a great deal every day about the nuances of design and deployment. With today’s deep interest in artificial fish habitat, we’re eager to share our findings with fisheries professionals who want to learn more. If you’ve missed any part of this series you can catch up at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Krzy... For more information contact David Ewald at https://www.fishiding.com Phone: (815) 693-0894 Email: sales@fishiding.com
Part Eight: A Revolutionary New Design In recent years, many new types of artificial fish habitat and various fish attractor styles have been installed from coast to coast. State agency fish managers and the fisheries industry as a whole, are using them to strategically enhance cover where natural habitat is at a premium. Although becoming very popular, numerous installers have reported some unanticipated problems. Because many current designs are fairly lightweight, they can be easily movable if not heavily weighted with additional materials. Once deployed, some models are prone to tipping over, sliding or being pushed around by wind, current and weather events. Boaters can inadvertently catch them on anchor lines, dragging them far from designated locations. Fisherman with strong braided lines can haul them up with this heavy gear. We’ve even heard reports of fisherman who find the attractors and move them to their own secret “honey holes”. Carefully marked GPS coordinates of where the structures were placed and should still be may be becoming less and less reliable, as installed materials get dragged away from the initial installation site. Fishiding Habitat has been addressing these concerns throughout their product line, including the introduction of the new patent pending line of products called Fish Habitat Mats. Simply put, they’re immovable, modular, habitat platforms that an array of habitat components can be secured upon/inside in limitless configurations. They can be carried, rolled or slid around quite easily during assembly, but become virtually immobile once on the lake floor. Hundreds of pounds of safe, dense cover can be secured in one secure cluster. The Mats will create extremely large complexes of cover, breaking a size barrier that has been previously limiting. Now, the dimensions and proportions of the habitat complexes can be measured in yards not feet. They can be as large as you want them, creating the kind of genuine fish-holding habitat that up until now has been unimaginable. We finally have a way to create credible artificial rivals to large pieces of coarse woody habitat, sunken timber, dense beds of vegetation and other kinds of habitat that nature ordinarily provides. Today’s video takes us to the Point View Resort on Missouri’s sprawling Lake of the Ozarks. Fishiding.com recently placed twenty separate Fish Habitat Mats, all outfitted with a variety of their habitat models and various PVC components. The Habitat Mats are designed to provide cover and protection for fish, along with improved angling opportunities for the resort’s fishing guests. The massive complex comprised of dozens of different models of artificial habitat, is believed to be the largest and most sophisticated of its kind ever used in a single location. We have known for years that to create a real fish magnet that’s stable, permanent and holds vast numbers of fish, it needs to be heavy and it needs to be big. The new Habitat Mat system recently placed in Lake of the Ozarks is colossal in scope. It’s a sophisticated fish-friendly habitat framework that was designed to grow aquatic life and make a real footprint on the lake floor, attracting and protecting substantial numbers of fish. The largest pieces tower from the lake floor some 16 feet creating underwater skyscrapers for fish to use as refuge. In total, the assembled complex weighs over 7,000 pounds and creates over 8,500 square feet of surface area. Other resorts, including the Point View as well as individual homeowners on Lake of the Ozarks, have for decades placed cedar trees or brush piles into the lake attempting to attract fish. Recent flooding and storms washed away virtually all the existing fish habitat that was previously placed at the Point View Resort. The Fishiding Reclaimed Artificial Fish Habitat, incorporated and anchored to the newly installed Fish Habitat Mats, have the kind of permanence and stability that fish managers have been asking for. Designing and building effective fish habitat is a genuine science. It’s still in its infancy, but we’re learning a great deal every day about the nuances of design and deployment. With today’s deep interest in artificial fish habitat, we’re eager to share our findings with fisheries professionals who want to learn more. If you’ve missed any part of this series you can catch up at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Krzy... For more information contact David Ewald at https://www.fishiding.com Phone: (815) 693-0894 Email: sales@fishiding.com
Part Nine: Modular Habitat Complexes as Large as City Blocks As we better understand how to create and assemble habitat components that work best together, we now also see the need to scale the overall complex size accordingly. Habitat installations are vulnerable to all kinds of unique forces underwater. Installation of multiple habitat pieces in one collected group, is now the accepted best practice. Especially in public waters, it can be difficult keeping these individually weighted components all together on the lake floor. Fishing pressure, strong currents, and weather events are just a few causes that can move habitat. To properly install vast amounts of fish habitat and have it permanently remain in a group, a fully engineered and pre-weighted modular attachment system was needed. It also needed to be simple to use, requiring no special equipment, tools or experience. Finally, to improve effectiveness and cost, the habitat needed to be larger, taller and heavier than anything previously considered or produced. These are the factors that shaped the decisions that lead to the design of the new Modular Habitat Mats by Fishiding.com. Although many different prototypes, designs and sizes of these new mat configurations have been created, none had yet been installed into any of our test waters. As decisions were being made regarding final product sizes, weights and models to begin to offer, a call came in from Laura Salamun, the owner of Point View Resort on the famous Lake of the Ozarks. “Fishing is our thing and it’s important to our resort guests”, she told us. “We want to have them catching fish non-stop, all year long.” This was just the challenge we needed to assess the full scale delivery, assembly and installation of 20 different mats of various configurations. This was a perfect opportunity to test the new Habitat Mats against many of the key metrics: This is a fishing resort with almost constant fishing pressure from shore to over 25 feet off three different floating docks. It’s located on a large public reservoir with stiff current, substantial slope, year-round boating pressure and unpredictable weather events. A customized layout and set of habitat plans were designed and approved to best accommodate the resort guests and their favorite fishing areas. Mats were specifically designed, selected and placed in spots that would best serve the present fish species. Would our delivery, assembly and installation work as planned? We had put the time in underwater studying the fish. By scuba diving and recording their interaction with various habitat materials over years, we knew the fish would gravitate into the newly designed complex and stay. The 20 individual mats, habitat models and supplies were shipped down and carried by hand onto the floating docks for assembly and placement. Some mats were completely finished and ready to slide into the water, while others had additional habitat materials attached to them on site to create even more complexity. No cable, rope, wood or brush was used, keeping the entire system snag-free and long lasting. Today’s video highlights the ease and scale of the Habitat Mat installation at Point View Resort with 20 separate, single level Mats. In the near future, these Mats will be installed in an array of considerably larger sizes, and unique shapes that will weigh thousands of pounds combined. Mats will be stacked into multiple three dimensional layers, creating permanent rooms, tunnels and floors, all built solely for fish habitation. Imagine a kind of underwater housing boom including roadways, parks, grocery stores and schools. Modular complexes each a city block in size and two or three stories tall. Islands of cover linked together for relaxing, hunting or hiding. A fish oasis. Fishiding. Designing and building effective fish habitat is a genuine science. It’s still in its infancy, but we’re learning a great deal every day about the nuances of design and deployment. With today’s deep interest in artificial fish habitat, we’re eager to share our findings with fisheries professionals who want to learn more. If you’ve missed any part of this series you can catch up at https://www.structurespot.com For more information contact David Ewald at https://www.fishiding.com Phone: (815) 693-0894 Email: sales@fishiding.com
Part Ten: Putting it all together-Top takeaways from our ten part series: • Protection is the key: If the habitat structures are designed and installed in a way that don’t reduce the attack to capture ratio, they provide no benefit for forage species and consequently won’t hold any fish at all. Effective fish habitat must be constructed with a labyrinth of pockets and retreats that are completely inaccessible to larger predators. • Fish are much more discriminating than we would ever have imagined. Because of that, every aspect of Fishiding habitat structures has a purpose or utility that the fish have shown us they prefer. • Our research shows that fish prefer complex designs that resemble natural elements like macrophytes or coarse woody habitat-They shy away from assemblages that look foreign and out of place. • There’s a real distinction between form and function. For artificial fish habitat to have any legitimate purpose at all, it needs to be genuinely functional and cannot just occupy space on the lake floor. Does your artificial habitat provide fish with shade, cover, safety, refuge, and food as well as natural habitat does? • It’s important to have a good understanding of the target lake’s topography, recruitment history and bio-chemical character. This will ensure that the habitat is placed in a location where it will be best used and where the employment of additional habitat would serve a purpose beneficial to the fish. • Artificial habitat units located in very close proximity to each other, always outperform single units standing alone. Fish will treat the combined individual units as one large, meandering reef. • Because we can never really get into a fishes head and our own intuition about what should work is unreliable, testing is imperative to physically see what the fish prefer. There’s no substitute for being in the water with the habitat and seeing it with your own eyes. It gives you the most complete picture of what’s happening within the habitat and how fish are relating to it. • We have all been thinking much too small. The challenge is not to make something that may function as well as a new Christmas tree, but to have higher aspirations, daring ourselves to design and deploy the kinds of habitat that Mother Nature herself will approve. • Fish Habitat Mats. Simply put, they’re immovable, modular, habitat platforms that an array of habitat components can be secured upon/inside in limitless configurations. They can be carried, rolled or slid around quite easily during assembly, but become virtually immobile once on the lake floor. Hundreds of pounds of safe, dense cover can be secured in one secure cluster. The Mats will create extremely large complexes of cover, breaking a size barrier that has been previously limiting. Now, the dimensions and proportions of the habitat complexes can be measured in yards not feet. They can be as large as you want them, creating the kind of genuine fish-holding habitat that up until now has been unimaginable. We finally have a way to create credible artificial rivals to large pieces of coarse woody habitat, sunken timber, dense beds of vegetation and other kinds of habitat that nature ordinarily provides. • To improve effectiveness and cost, the habitat needed to be larger, taller and heavier than anything previously considered or produced. These are the factors that shaped the decisions that lead to the design of the new Modular Habitat Mats by Fishiding.com. Designing and building effective fish habitat is a genuine science. It’s still in its infancy, but we’re learning a great deal every day about the nuances of design and deployment. With today’s deep interest in artificial fish habitat, we’re eager to share our findings with fisheries professionals who want to learn more. If you’ve missed any part of this series you can catch up at https://structurespot.com/
This unique installation of our new Habitat Mats inside the heated fishing house at Pointviewresort.com., required some extra thought totaling over 400# and units far taller than the ceiling, railing, etc. They are catching fish around them as they age and build natural growth.
Click on the installation video to see how to bend and install your fishiding artificial fish habitat. There is no wrong shape or design, experiment with mixing sizes, types and variety of structure types to give fish choices on different days.
Wild Rose State Fish Hatchery Musky habitat study
Here's a few videos taken of our products underwater.