Trout again! Anyone?

[Bucksnbows]

I know we've derailed poor GhostBear's thread, but I am always amazed at how few eels I see in the river (hardly any) versus the numbers we find when electrofishing (dozens to hundreds for every 100 meter reach we sample).  I remember surveying West Portal Brook, a Musky trib in Hunterdon, a few years ago for a river channel restoration project.  I was standing in foot deep water in a very small stream when I heard a splash and turned just in time to watch a 3 /12 foot American eel swim between my legs. I can't tell you how many times I see them slither unharmed out of the CAT excavator bucket when we are doing river channel restoration.  They never seem to be harmed even though the bucket is full of gravel and cobbles seemingly packed together in the bucket after being scooped out.   

[TDietz]

The state used to stock West Portal brook when I was a kid, that was "our" brook, caught my first trout there in the 173,(22) tunnel May 1,1966. Had a bunch of wild browns in it back then.

 

I once saw a guy drop a boulder big enough to kill a raccoon off a bridge into a ball of spawning lampreys in shallow water and it bounced like they were made of rubber, not a scratch on any of em

[Bucksnbows]

The state used to stock West Portal brook when I was a kid, that was "our" brook, caught my first trout there in the 173,(22) tunnel May 1,1966. Had a bunch of wild browns in it back then.

 

I once saw a guy drop a boulder big enough to kill a raccoon off a bridge into a ball of spawning lampreys in shallow water and it bounced like they were made of rubber, not a scratch on any of em

 

That stream saw a gross injustice last summer when a truck full of detergent broke down on I-78 and caught on fire.  The local fire department hosed down the detergents which entered a storm drain and polluted this gem of a stream, killing most of the fish and many of the insects in it.  It set up what is today New Jersey's first brook trout recovery project where the wild browns are being continuously electro fished out and relocated into the lower Pohatcong Creek while the native brook trout are allowed to remain, hopefully to repopulate this stream with less or no competition from the more aggressive and non-native wild browns.  I restored about one mile of this stream near where it flows into the Musky two springs ago.  It also harbors slimy sculpins, the only NJ native fish requiring colder, cleaner water than our native brook trout.  Both fish are also important vectors for the glochidia (think larva) for freshwater mussel reproduction that spend time growing harmlessly on the gills of those fish before falling off and becoming young mussels.  Mussels are critical to water quality, filtering thousands of gallons of fresh water each day.  But enough fish geek speak   

[TDietz]

That sucks about accident. These brookies actual NJ strain? Very little development done in that drainage since I can remember, besides I78 that is. A lot less farming runoff that's for sure. It was the  perfect brook, we would fish the entire thing up and down in a day, lotta good memories. Knew everybody along it.

[GhostBear]

I know we've derailed poor GhostBear's thread, but I am always amazed at how few eels I see in the river (hardly any) versus the numbers we find when electrofishing (dozens to hundreds for every 100 meter reach we sample).  I remember surveying West Portal Brook, a Musky trib in Hunterdon, a few years ago for a river channel restoration project.  I was standing in foot deep water in a very small stream when I heard a splash and turned just in time to watch a 3 /12 foot American eel swim between my legs. I can't tell you how many times I see them slither unharmed out of the CAT excavator bucket when we are doing river channel restoration.  They never seem to be harmed even though the bucket is full of gravel and cobbles seemingly packed together in the bucket after being scooped out.

 

no worries, go on talking fish geek, I'm interested!

[Bucksnbows]

That sucks about accident. These brookies actual NJ strain? Very little development done in that drainage since I can remember, besides I78 that is. A lot less farming runoff that's for sure. It was the  perfect brook, we would fish the entire thing up and down in a day, lotta good memories. Knew everybody along it.

 

 

We don't know, but only because that stream was not included in Pat Hamilton's master's thesis DNA study that identified Heritage strain brook trout in all 3 major drainages.  The Delaware, the Raritan and the Passaic would be those drainages, and all 3 have known Heritage strain brookies in them which is a miracle when you consider that non-native strain brook trout have been stocked in NJ waters for over a century.  Heritage fish mean their DNA is unique to their drainage and shows no interbreeding with strains such as the Nashua strain that the state used to stock.  Nashua as in Nashua, NH where the US Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) raises brook trout and which is where NJ's brook trout stock came from for the Pequest hatchery which are no more.  The cool thing is that when Division biologists electro fish brookies in streams today, they take a very small fin clip and store them in jars in preservative.  Some day those samples can be run through DNA analysis to see what other streams hold pure strain Heritage brookies.  When Pat did her study, she had to use heart blood, and that limited her to a certain size fish otherwise she would get high mortality.  Many of our headwater first and second order streams (S1 and S2) hold very small native brookies, far too small for Pat's original study.  She also used the criteria that there could be no known stocking in that stream and no known wild browns, just brook trout and preferably on streams that had some form of a fish passage barrier like a dam.  

[GhostBear]

Hey, got a question, why weren't heritage trout used at the hatchery? Was it due to size? Where the NH fish bigger to start with?

Ok, so that's three questions! Lol, would it be feasible to star raising a native jersey brookie for stocking in current streams?

[1957Buck]

Hey, got a question, why weren't heritage trout used at the hatchery? Was it due to size? Where the NH fish bigger to start with?

Ok, so that's three questions! Lol, would it be feasible to star raising a native jersey brookie for stocking in current streams?

Your answer $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$  Disease, no interest, Science, would most likely be a Hybrid, Mortality, No survival rate.  

[Cedars]

Nice catch!

[MRMCR]

Ive seen lots of eels in the Rahway river.....

[BCsaw]

The only casting I see!

[Bucksnbows]

Hey, got a question, why weren't heritage trout used at the hatchery? Was it due to size? Where the NH fish bigger to start with?

Ok, so that's three questions! Lol, would it be feasible to star raising a native jersey brookie for stocking in current streams?

 

You have to understand fisheries history to understand some of the issues why we now have a mess all over the US with trout fisheries.  Back around the 1860s and 1870s, we knew beyond a shadow of doubt that our rivers were not only polluted with what was then the early Industrial Age, but we knew that our rivers were never again going to be clean enough for native brook trout here in the East where that species is native.  That began a federal program to introduce non-native rainbows from the McCloud River in California.  These rainbows were shipped all over the country, but mostly East to a new hatchery system that was a combination of federal, state (eventually) and private.  A short time later, brown trout were introduced from Scotland and Germany because they showed a higher tolerance for both warmer water as well as pollution (we had cut down all our trees all over the banks and forests, adding sunlight which warmed our rivers and brought in tons of sediment as banks failed).  People moving West from the East wanted to bring brook trout with them because they liked that species, so brookies were stocked over native cutthroat, for example.  Today, the entire country is a mess and we have precious few major drainages (if any) that hold only native fish in them.  Same for warmwater species.  Take NJ for example.  If man had not meddled, we would have no largemouth or smallmouth, no pike, no walleyes, no muskellunge, no bluegills, no channel cats, etc. as well as no rainbow or brown trout.

 

So we saw our native brook trout as a species that wouldn't survive in the Industrial Age, hence why other strains that grow fast, large and successfully in a hatchery situation were used and are used to this day.  Hatchery trout bear very little resemblance to their original ancestry.  Fortunately, we still have many of our native trout all over the US and there are conservation organizations that work hard to protect and often to reintroduce them to native waters.  NJ is about to go to 100% no kill for any and all brook trout in 2018 in an effort to better protect our one native trout which is actually a cousin of the trout in the char family and not a true trout.    

 

If this topic interests anyone, the best book I know of is: An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World by Anders Halverson.

 

It not only chronicles the spread of non-native rainbows, but explains why we introduced all sorts of non-native species of both plants and animals as European settlers continued to arrive and populate the US at that time.  It's a great read and highly researched.   

   

[Bucksnbows]

For those of you that fish the upper Delaware, the McCloud River strain rainbows in that system are more genetically pure than the rainbows in the McCloud River today.  The upper D bows were introduced in the late 1800s and have hung on for decades before the city of NY built the drinking water reservoirs on the East and West Branches which created a fantastic tailwater fishery for both the wild bows and wild browns which are also a long ago introduced strain of fish into the upper D.  But many of the Delaware tributaries still have native brook trout although the mainstem and the two major tribs - East and West- have very few native brookies.  Not the right habitat anymore after we cut all the hemlocks along the rivers for pallets and to clear the lowlands (floodplains) to farm corn and other crops which greatly widened those rivers over time and changed their temperature profiles once the sun was able to shine down through the once stately hemlocks that are all long gone.    

[TDietz]

For those of you that fish the upper Delaware, the McCloud River strain rainbows in that system are more genetically pure than the rainbows in the McCloud River

 

that's amazing

 

I've fished a few places out west where they want the brookies fished out. Up on the Yak in MT the limit is 25 a day, so we would go get our limits of fingerling sized brookies, gut em, fry em up and eat eat em whole! Good eatin there.