New trout regs

[Pikebreath]

Originally Posted by goldscud

It is easy for you to tell a Cutthroat from a rainbow....but for a large number of folks it is not. Some people can't tell a Bull trout from a rainbow (or don't want to). Government doesn't trust the general population to make the Cutt/Rainbow choice.

I am glad you can tell the difference, becuz I sure can't tell you at what point a cutthroat becomes a rainbow and a rainbow becomes a cutthroat. At issue is the hybridization of rainbow with cutts.... Just cuz a trout has orange slash on its throat doesn't make it an honest to goodness cutthroat by genetic standards. What we do have mostly are cuttbows in the upper and mid sections of most ES1 streams,,, some are more cutty like which we anglers tend to call cutts and and others look more rainbow like which we call rainbows, but scratch the genetic code of any these trout and you'll most likely find a mixed / blended heritage.

So even if we remove everything without an orange slash from the affected drainages, we might be able to move towards a population with more cutthroat like features, but they still will not be geneticaly pure cutthroats.

I think the bigger question (at this point in time) is can we really restore the native cutts to their former ranges? Are we really willing to sacrifice the rainbows (and cuttbows for that matter) in an attempt to fix something that is already beyond fixing?

Perhaps we can save the remaining few select headwater populations of pure strain cutts, but to do so requires isolating them from rainbow trout and cuttbows. Fortunately cutts tolerate colder water better than rainbows so thermal barriers along protection of all trout in these colder headwater streams maybe the best we can do.