ABERAERON TOWN ANGLING CLUB

THE RIVER AERON’S ONLY ANGLING CLUB

News 2025

13 January - water quality testing

Many of you will have seen previous news on our water quality testing programme on the Aeron. Mike Lench kindly volunteers to do the testing at roughly 2 week intervals and tests for temperature, pH, conductivity, phosphate and nitrate at 3 points on the lower Aeron:

1 Llanerchaeron at the picnic area (main river sample above the Mydyr confluence)

2 Corner Pool (below the Mydyr but above the sewage treatment works)

3 Town pools (worst case taking contributions from upstream, Mydyr and sewage treatment works)

The data has been collected for several months now and a picture is emerging. Nitrate routinely fails the alert limit and phosphate is present but at low levels with spikes. Of course this is not real time monitoring but is at a frequency of one day in fourteen so we may be missing many spikes but simply don’t have the resources to test daily. Phosphate and nitrate in rivers arise from agricultural run off and from sewage treatment processes. Slurry spreading on land in the Aeron valley has been and remains a serious diffuse and acute pollution source; acute incidents can kill fish and aquatic invertebrates over many miles of river whereas diffuse and chronic sources can result in eutrophication of the water resulting in blooms of algae, something we have seen very regularly in summer months with algae coating the stones in the river bed; the Aeron is an acidic low nutrient river that should not result in these levels of algae.

The Club will continue to monitor, developing the picture as more data is accumulated. With other similar citizen scientist studies taking place in the county, the assembled data will prove useful over time in addressing the problem.
A big thank you is extended to Mike for giving up his time in all weathers to collect this valuable data.

Click on the graphs below to expand onto a larger page for ease of viewing.