Native Adirondack trout? No such animal, technically
Four species of trout can be found in Adirondacks waters. Of the mix, two were introduced from the outside, one from Europe and one from the...
Jul 16, 2020 — Four species of trout can be found in Adirondacks waters. Of the mix, two were introduced from the outside, one from Europe and one from the western United States. The two species which are native to the area are technically not trout at all, but relatives of the arctic char.
Martha Foley and Curt Stager get into the genetic weeds with Adirondack sport fish.
MARTHA FOLEY: So let’s talk about trout. Let’s talk about the trout that we know here, in the North Country, in the Adirondacks. Brook trout, lake trout, brown trout, and rainbow trout. Any other trout?
CURT STAGER: Those are the big ones, so brook trout, lake trout, brown trout, and rainbows; those are the main ones.
FOLEY: What are the native trout, let’s start with those.
STAGER: If you could travel back in time and go fishing in the Adirondacks, let’s say three hundred years ago or something like that, you would’ve gotten brook trout and lake trout.
FOLEY: That’s it?
STAGER: The brown trout were brought over from Europe, so they’re not native to North America. And the rainbow trout are from the western part of North America, so they’re also not native to this area and they weren’t here until people brought them.
FOLEY: So someone is just thinking the brook trout and the lake trout aren’t enough, we gotta have other trout.
STAGER: Well it’s a more varied experience; they’ve all got their different appearances, their different behaviors. Anglers like to have that kind if diversity.
FOLEY: They just can’t let well enough alone. Would these be called invasive species? Were we talking in those terms a little bit?
STAGER: Well it depends on what your perspective is. We would be the ones to decide whether we think of them as a great addition to the sport fishing, or as a non-native invasive species. If you don’t like them or do like them, you decide how you describe them.
FOLEY: But then you were saying that some of them weren’t really trout.
STAGER: Well, now you get into the classification stuff. The brook trout and lake trout that have been here for thousands of years technically aren’t really trout. They’re more correctly classified as a char. Like there is a fish called an arctic char that looks like them. The true trout are more closely related to what we call salmon. So it gets pretty confusing that way. Brown trout, the ones from Europe, do count as real trout. So you get in this tangled web of classification.
FOLEY: OK, so here’s the thing, we have a camp at Lake Ozonia. We’ve got this landlocked salmon that someone caught, that was the best fish I ever ate that was truly different looking. It was silver with black spots, it was beautiful; the flesh was pink. But it was in the same kind of area as the trout, people were catching rainbow trout, and the landlocked salmon. So I didn’t really know about landlocked salmon.
STAGER: Yeah, it gets really complicated, and it’s easy to forget that a lot of what we see in the lakes today was put there by people for various reasons. So they may not, say, be naturally familiar neighbors with one another, and sometimes they may compete with each other as well. Some of them may reproduce more easily in that wild situation than others, some may have to be stocked more, things like that. The real locals in this part of the world would tend to be the lake trout, which tend to be in deeper water, hanging around the bottoms of lakes. Brook trout can be in lakes, but of course in running water too, where you’d never find a lake trout.
FOLEY: And so the visitors are the rainbow trout, the brown trout, which we consider native, because they’re wild trout, and the landlocked salmon.
STAGER: Right, so that raises this whole new question among anglers now, if some of these fish have been here for a century or more, and they’re adapting to the local conditions, maybe we could encourage that too, and let them, you could say go wild…
FOLEY: and go native.
STAGER: Basically like that. and you wouldn’t have to be stocking them, either. They’d just sort of be there, as part of the landscape.
