Don Macleod Founder & Owner, CarpChip

Don’s connection with fishing goes back almost as far as he can remember. He started fishing at around five years old, sea fishing with his dad before moving into coarse fishing on rivers for roach, rudd, perch and eels. Then he caught his first carp when he was 19.

That was it! He never really looked back.

Don’s fishing took him far beyond UK waters. He spent around eight years game fishing around the world and became involved in catch and release sea fish tagging through The Billfish Foundation in Florida. 

That later developed into shark tagging around the Caribbean with The Shark Foundation, including tiger sharks and lemon sharks. Working closely with researchers who were trying to learn more about where different shark species travelled, where they went to pup and whether they returned to the same areas. 

Don became involved simply through, as he puts it, “a love of everything that swims.”

A trip to Mauritius for the Marlin World Cup in 2006 led to more tagging in Africa and a growing interest in what could be learned by identifying individual fish.

That interest stayed with him.  For Don, it was never just about catching the fish. It was about understanding them.

Fisheries Management Qualification

Don’s interest in fish developed, and he wanted to understand more about what was happening beneath the surface.

He went on to complete a Sport Fishery Management course at Sparsholt College, studying areas including carp behaviour, water chemistry, fish anatomy, digestion and reproduction. As Don says, it was about learning “the inside and the outside of a carp and everything that makes them tick.”

That knowledge, combined with years of practical fishing experience, shaped the way he started looking at fish identification and fish welfare.

Later in the early 2000's particularly,  whilst fishing in France, microchipping was initially all about big carp being stolen and turning up elsewhere, microchipping was "spawned" from security. Don began seeing fish PIT tagging used more widely, however record keeping was still very much paper based with no clear way to understand fish stock and trends over time.

If you can permanently identify an individual fish, you can start to build a genuine picture of that fish over time.

Its weight.

Its catches.

Its condition.

Its history.

And that is where the idea behind CarpChip really started.