How not to care for a state’s official fish

Isn't it time for fish & game departments to recognize stocked trout for what they are: gene-polluting, wild-trout-displacing, artificially produced psuedo-trout designed to fill a specific recreational niche?

Why keep diluting or destroying our few remaining wild fish stocks?

After the Upper Sacramento River was sterilized by a train accident in 1991, the local hatchery started dumping trout in a pair of ponds -- a move that was surprisingly well received.

When the river reopened several years later, the fishermen were overjoyed at the size of the wild fish, yet rather than learn from this episode, the state began stocking the central section of the river, and immediately, the average fish size plummeted.

Lesson learned? Not hardly -- a half-dozen years ago (under pressure from locals), they expanded the stocking zone, further hybridizing and pressuring the native coastal rainbows.

Tom Chandler/Trout Underground

Hi Tom: In my state of Mass. where there is very little trout reproduction, I wouldn’t object to hatchery trout so much if they looked a little like trout. But they look like hornpout--rounded tails, fleshy dorsals, and stubs instead of pectorals. Truly ugly! I caught four hatchery rainbows and a hatchery brown the other day when I was fishing a woodland stream for brookies. I did get five or six wild brookies, all about five inches -- which I released. I don’t mind catching -- and killing -- stocked brookies, whose fins for some reason hold up better in hatcheries and which, of course, taste good. In fact, if I’m gonna kill brookies, I’d prefer to kill stockers. I wish they’d raise more of those and fewer rainbows and browns. Then, of course, there’s WV-- a state which almost rivals Maine for its wild brookie resource. But the official patch of the state's Department of Natural Resources features a mutated rainbow trout. This fish -- called a “West Virginia Centennial Golden Trout” -- is a pigment-impoverished freak that turned up in a hatchery in 1954 and has been cultured ever since. It's so popular that Pennsylvania borrowed the warped genes to concoct what it calls its “palomino trout.”
Best,
Ted