The Billings Gazette has just published a piece by Brett French (20 Nov 16) updating Yellowstone National Park’s lake trout eradication efforts.
It was another record year for removal of lake trout from Yellowstone Lake — about 366,000 of the nonnative trout were netted and killed in an effort to restore the fishery’s native Yellowstone cutthroat trout.
“The population size structure is continuing to show signs of collapse,” said Todd Koel, Yellowstone fisheries supervisor. “There are fewer large fish and small fish.”
What’s more, the Park Service may have found a new way to recycle those dead fish that would mean even fewer lake trout in the ecosystem — using the lake trout carcasses to smother their progeny. In test plots in the lake, as well as a Bozeman laboratory, dumping the dead fish on lake trout eggs killed all of the embryos in about two weeks…
Read the full piece here. (Posted without further editorializing, but it’s damned hard not to.)
