[Read Part One here if you missed it yesterday…]
Take the South Fork of the Snake River—a local stream for me.
Currently, there are no fish stocked in the river, but that hasn’t always been the case. The cutthroats are native Yellowstone cutts—the same species that swim in Yellowstone Lake and its namesake river. The South Fork is also home to wild brown trout and the more troubling wild rainbows (which means that it is also home to the extremely troubling cuttbow), all of which are a remnant of years of planting hatchery fish.
The cutthroats didn’t evolve downstream of a massive dam, although that is their current home. They evolved in the face of the very thing that dam was built to trap and store: spring runoff. The South Fork’s cutthroats tend to spawn in feeder creeks (which are still subject to runoff). The river’s rainbows tend to spawn in the main channel—where their eggs and redds are not bothered by spring runoff because of the aforementioned dam. All these factors (and who knows what else) have changed the river enough to put the native cutthroats in serious danger. In short, the wild fish have the native cutthroat populations on the ropes. When you begin considering the potential for Yellowstone cutthroat to go on the endangered species list (thanks to the illegal planting of lake trout in Yellowstone Lake), well, the next step in the process becomes pretty illusive to the average fisherman. What can be done?
The Idaho Department of Fish and Game has been asking local anglers to catch and kill wild rainbows, which are the descendants of fish planted by (you guessed it) the Idaho Department of Fish and Game a few dozen years ago (just a tick of the second hand on the evolutionary clock). Even though IDFG’s involvement makes this rainbow-killing scheme seem like a paradox that will disrupt the space/time continuum (not to mention a crime against wildness), I can get on board with this idea of killing wild trout to save native trout—at least in this specific case. I can catch rainbows (even wild ones) in a number of local waters, but I can’t catch big native Yellowstone Cutthroat very many places at all, so I don’t mind smashing a few rainbow heads and sliding them into a freezer bag and a cooler for consumption later on. In short, I’m not crazy about losing one of the major native fish strongholds in the area and I don’t want to take any chance that we might lose native Yellowstone cutts altogether.
Not everyone feels this way. Many fly fishermen I talk to think it is a hassle to kill the ‘bows. Some of these same folks argue that the cutts don’t fight very well. They also mention that the paltry number of rainbows caught by a single fisherman on that massive river is a nothing but a proverbial drop in the bucket, so why bother?
Such is the gray, soupy, hatchery vs. wild vs. native trout conundrum. And that is just one river. We haven’t even touched on the genetic freak that is the triploid trout, or the political and environmental war zone known as hatchery steelhead and farm-raised salmon. We like to deride the pelletheads (and many times they deserve it), but wild fish came from somewhere, and they can’t all be natives, right? In the end we are left with a list of difficult questions: How do we decide when the wild fish should be sacrificed for the natives and where the hatchery fish should be planted (if at all)? Is it okay to secretly enjoy catching pelletheads? How big does a wild fish have to be in order to be superior to a native? How big does a planter have to be in order to be worth catching at all? How do we solve these (imagined and real) ethical quandaries?
Well, lucky for us, John Gierach provided the answer to these questions (and a thousand others) when he wrote: “The solution to any problem—work, love, money, whatever—is to go fishing, and the worse the problem, the longer the trip should be.”
Part three (the final piece) to follow.
