Tiny radio transmitters attached to lake trout may allow managers find and destroy their spawning beds-
The illegal or accidental introduction of lake trout to Yellowstone Lake has heavily damaged the native Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout Fishery in the Lake, and more importantly in the spawning streams where they used to provide food for many kinds of wildlife and human anglers too. Lake Trout rarely come to the surface and they eat cutthroat trout. So their biomass is lost to all surface creatures.
There is a long-standing program to catch and kill and lake trout, but it has at most held the lake trout onslaught at bay. Now there is a chance of killing them off (note: not “euthanizing” them) and restoring a great fishery.
The New York Times article below also writes of the decline in the number of people who fish, attributing it to sociological factors. Hmmmm. I slowly stopped fishing mostly because the quality and abundance declined because of diseases like whirling disease, human ruination of wild fisheries, livestock stomping the stream banks, etc.
In Yellowstone, Killing One Kind of Trout to Save Another. By Kirk Johnson. New York Times.
Ralph Maughan
Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University. He has been a Western Watersheds Project Board Member off and on for many years, and also its President. For many years he produced Ralph Maughan's Wolf Report. He was a founder of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. He and Jackie Johnson Maughan wrote three editions of "Hiking Idaho." He also wrote "Beyond the Tetons" and "Backpacking Wyoming's Teton and Washakie Wilderness." He created and is the administrator of The Wildlife News.
