The Shadow
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) – This year, the state will put thousands of brown trout into Virginia’s waterways. And federal officials will keep working to kill them in Shenandoah National Park.
The divergent treatment of brown trout represents a tension in wildlife management: the preservation of the natural versus recreation for the masses. It is also part of the growing question of how to address non-native species such as the brown trout.
“Nowhere do we find so much hypocrisy on the issue of invasive species than among the fisheries departments of the various state wildlife agencies all over the U.S.,” said Jackson Landers, a local hunter and fisherman who is currently working on a book about eating invasive species. “On one day they issue warnings about the dangers of zebra mussels and rock snot, and the next day they release thousands of invasive brown trout into streams where they compete with native rainbow and brook trout.”
Landers, responding by email, did add that he thinks the state’s Department of Game and Inland Fisheries does a very good job overall.
The dual approach to brown trout in Virginia creates some odd situations for anglers in Shenandoah National Park.
To limit the spread of brown trout, the park has a rule that requires anglers to kill and throw away certain fish. The special regulation applies to three bodies of water in Madison County: the Rose and Hughes rivers and Brokenback Run. There, any angler who catches a brown trout longer than 7 inches is obliged to keep it. Any angler who catches a brown trout shorter than 7 inches is forbidden from keeping it, but also forbidden from putting it back. Instead, the trout “must be disposed of away from the stream and away from park roads or trails.”
“Setting minimum sizes and creel limits for invasive species is a counterproductive idea,” Landers wrote. “Mandating wanton waste (a legal term for killing, but not eating fish or game) is an equally bad idea.”
In many ways, brown trout are great for recreation: the fish get big and survive well, even in warm water and with lots of fishing pressure. But they aren’t native, and, when they share a stream with native brook trout, the brook trout usually end up losing out, getting pushed farther and farther up the mountain to streams so small that brown trout can’t inhabit them.
National park efforts to remove the brown trout have drawn criticism. When there was outcry over wholesale destruction of the trout by park employees, cooperative efforts were established to relocate the fish, though recently the number of trout found in the Madison County streams has dropped to the point that relocation is no longer worth the effort.
Officials have been electroshocking the special-regulations streams so consistently over the last few years, and have removed so many of the brown trout, that anglers rarely catch – and by extension rarely kill and discard – any, said Jeb Wofford, a fish and wildlife biologist at Shenandoah National Park.
But park officials know that, if the controls on brown trout are relaxed, their populations will rebound. Officials view the problem as one of perpetual management rather than one that can be solved by extirpation – the local eradication of a given species.
“There’s a long history here, but I guess the bottom line is that the park service’s primary interest is in preserving native fish,” Wofford said.
There’s a slightly different policy in the George Washington & Jefferson National Forests, where the U.S. Forest Service, not the National Park Service, holds sway.
The Forest Service recognizes the recreational value of brown trout and doesn’t take active steps to eradicate them, but manages habitat with brook trout in mind, said Dawn Kirk, forest fisheries biologist with the Forest Service.
One of the earliest stocked fish was the brown trout. It was introduced in the area around Shenandoah National Park in 1963, Wofford said. At this point, stocking is a well-established way of doing things.
The cost of producing and distributing more than a million stocked trout each year is covered by the trout license anglers must purchase to chase stocked fish in the state ($18 for residents). Unlike some other states, no special stamp is needed to chase wild trout.
Officials all around the country stocked both brown and rainbow trout widely in the early 20th century in a bid to expand fishing opportunities. In some states, officials have even resorted to using airplanes to “bomb” mountain lakes with trout.
“Most invasive vertebrates are out there because some people decided that they wanted to have them around,” Landers wrote.
Even the brook trout in the park, the prize those fighting brown trout are trying to protect, are, in some cases, the descendants of stocked trout, Wofford said.
There are 2,300 miles of wild trout streams in the state, most of them holding native brook trout, said James “Chubby” Damron, president of the Thomas Jefferson Chapter of Trout Unlimited. That statistic could be a bit misleading, though, in that native brook trout thrive in even very small, very high mountain streams, where an adult fish might be only 5 inches long. But it’s still a lot of trout. And, because the park runs along the crest of the Blue Ridge, a lot of those small, mountain streams are park waters.
While state officials stock brown trout, they keep them out of streams where they could threaten native brook trout. But some populations of brown trout, stocked before the policy change, have taken root and are reproducing in the wild. It’s those wild, non-native fish that the National Park Service is trying to limit.
Brown trout enter the park in areas other than the three special-regulation streams, including along the South Fork of the Moormans River in Albemarle County, but the three Madison County streams are the only ones where officials are aware of populations fully contained within park boundaries. A population in the North Fork of the Moormans is believed to have been wiped out by flooding in the 1990s.
But even when the state only stocks brook trout, there are concerns that the stocked fish could change the genetic makeup of wild fish. The fish the state stocks are descended from New York trout, said Larry Mohn, regional aquatics manager for the state Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.
Mohn said the state is hoping to move increasingly to stocking sterile fish, with the idea of eventually stocking them anywhere there are native brook trout, a move that Wofford supports. It’s a strategy that has been used successfully in other states, officials said.
“It’s just like when you castrate a steer . it makes bigger trout, quicker,” Damron said.
In the end, Landers wrote, any change to the state’s approach to brown trout would have to make inroads with the people who actually buy fishing licenses.
Damron said he’s on board.
“It’s nice to go up there and catch a brown trout occasionally,” he said. “But there are other places you can do that.”
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Information from: The Daily Progress, http://www.dailyprogress.com
