Trying to improve fishing by stocking, limiting bag size, slot fish sizes and even habitat improvements can have unintended results. Manipulating nature instead of working with the natural process never really works. Kind of pushes the problem down stream.
A few terms to chew on: native, non native, near native and invasive. I won't bore anyone with long drawn out nuances of each, but consider a native can be invasive as well as a non native. A near native is usually a replacement for a native that has been lost, as it possess the same qualities of that now disappeared native. It too can become invasive in the right circumstances.
Consider three species of trout, Brown, rainbow and brook (actually a char). One is a native to Europe and maybe North America before the continents shifted eons ago, the next is a native to the western slope and North Pacific region and the last found in the higher latitudes and elevations of North America it also has origins as a genus in Northern Europe and the similar regions. So now define which is a native?
While I am not a big fan of stocking and the practice of following a watery truck around, stocking has been the device needed to enhance the catch rate and availability of fish. Trout do adapt and quickly figure it out and the easy fish soon die as natural selection takes its toll. We like to call fish from last years stocking as over wintered fish, more correctly those fortunate few who figured out how not to get caught and found cooler waters to survive the summer.
Browns were stocked for their fighting ability and that they like to pounce on any fly. Rainbows tend to run toward the sea like their ancestors did and generally lie on the stream bed lazily feeding on whatever floats by. Brook after centuries of adapting to a stream use their local knowledge to survive. I am not sure how much of the gene pool is the original fish. As a boy I eagerly awaited the annual stocking guide and brook or as listed then speckled trout was implanted in every stream and pond in the local area.
Fact, Eisenhower was a big fly fisherman and every time he went fishing the local fishery people dumped a ton of trout in the rivers he was fishing. The result were, that those streams have an outstanding brown trout fishery today . Damn the native speckled trout, the general wants to catch some real fish. A local fishery manager used data collected and decided to increase the number of rainbows implanted and reduce the browns. His argument was that the data showed more rainbows were returned and caught again and again. The next reason was financial, a disaster at one hatchery made the number of browns very limited and more costly to raise. The unintended consequence was that while catchable by euro-nymphing, the lazy bastard would either lay on the bottom or run downstream after stocking and head out to sea. Not a fan of euro- nymphing.
Stock fish tend to school up and those pools tend to attract fisher person looking to improve their numbers. Not a big fan of catch counts, see the stages of fly fishing to understand. Not a fan of the easiest to catch or competing with ours who beat the water to death, usually racing to the next spot and ignorant of those shadows that dart ahead as they approach. The hard to catch ones, the real natives. Unintended consequence steam improvements that aren't natural. Not a fan of wooden fences and trampled steam vegetation.
To be continued.......................................
No comments:
Post a Comment