Stocking Brookies to Save Cutthroat

I’ve had the pleasure of documenting many cutthroat restoration efforts over the previous decade, principally in Utah, the place I grew up. However this latest story from Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) is likely one of the most attention-grabbing cutthroat conservation tales I’ve ever heard.

Rachel Gonzales wrote the story for Colorado Outside, and I extremely suggest you learn all the factor. What she builds as much as is the primary remedy of its sort to make use of brook trout to assist restore native cutthroat populations.

How is that doable, you ask? Don’t we all know that brook trout out-compete cutthroat, actually forcing the native fish out of the water? Sure, we do. And we all know that whole eradication of brook trout is often solely doable via rotenone therapies—poisoning a river or lake.

However the scientists over at CPW determined to consider issues in another way, and lately hatched a plan to inventory YY brook trout in creeks throughout the Williams Fork River headwaters. By stocking YY male brook trout, biologists make sure that each offspring these fish produce is male. Stocking these “Trojan Brook Trout” right into a river that’s inhabited by each cutthroat and brookies will ultimately create a inhabitants of male-only brook trout. With none females round, the brook trout will ultimately die out, leaving the cutthroat to take again their historic native vary.

It’s an revolutionary approach, and one which doesn’t require a piscicide like rotenone. This retains genetically pure populations of cutthroat trout—the fish which might be present in Williams Fork headwaters—alive and never depending on a hatchery to reclaim them.

Once more, Gonzales does an exquisite job together with her story, and I counsel you learn the entire thing right here.