What to Do With Non-Native Trout Species?

This brown trout is clearly wild—lovely, feisty, and enjoyable to catch—but it surely lives in a river the place it competes with native brook trout. Photograph: Phil Monahan

Fly fishers have lengthy created a hierarchy of trout within the U.S., based mostly on nature. On the prime of the pyramid are native species, caught within the waters they’ve inhabited for millennia; subsequent are wild trout, born within the river by means of pure propagation; and on the backside are stockers, fished reared in  hatchery and planted for anglers to catch. However over the previous 140 years, lots of these stocked populations have change into wild, and lots of of these wild populations compete with natives.

Writing in Sports activities Illustrated, Jasper Taback, discusses the problems raised by this dilemma, in addition to some potential options:

When brown trout have been launched to the USA within the late 1800s, the aim was to offer extra sport-fishing alternatives. It labored – brown trout have unfold all through the nation, boosting leisure fishing alternatives alongside the way in which.

Sadly, their unfold, together with the stocking of rainbow trout in non-native waters, has contributed to the decline of our native trout populations. The injury has been executed – non-native trout are right here, and in a giant means. So now what? 

Click here to read the full story at Sports Illustrated