Interesting Read- Restoring Native Cutthroat

[FloatnFly]

http://www.drakemag.com/featured-content/daily-drake/1705-national-park-service-winning-war-against-nonnative-lake-trout-in-yellowstone.html

 

National Park Service (NPS) killed a record 366,000 cutthroat-gobbling, nonnative lake trout in Yellowstone Lake this year. Part of the park’s desperate effort to restore tanking native cutthroat populations, the program has dispatched about 1.5 million lakers in the last five years.

Now they’ve found a new way to kill off the next generation of lakers: drop their parents’ carcasses on top of them. NPS has identified about a dozen lake trout spawning sites and testing has shown that smothering the redds with the dead kills off all the eggs in about two weeks. After little payoff from methods like suction dredging and rotenone NPS says it’s thrilled about the possibilities.

“We have that material [fish carcasses] out there already. It’s not introducing anything foreign. So it has all kinds of attractive attributes,” says Yellowstone fisheries supervisor Todd Koel. Adding, “The mechanism we don’t know exactly, but all of that stuff that causes decay—bacteria and fungus along with no oxygen.”

With the laker population declining, native Yellowstone cutthroat are gaining ground in this war of attrition. Important tributaries like Clear and Little Thumb creeks are seeing an uptick in spawners and the remote Thorofare region is hosting more and bigger cutties than seen in recent years.

[Old Ironmaker]

I wonder how the non native Lakers got into the lake in the first place? I never agree with Humans playing God in nature unless we are reversing bad decisions of the past.

[Joeytier]

Brook trout have been introduced into many areas out there as well, much to the detriment of the native cuttys. Sort of like the resident browns and steelhead smolts putting the squeeze on native brookies in GL tributary headwaters.

[Old Ironmaker]

It's strange how we as humans prefer one species over another and give them preferential treatment over another.