A crew of current and retired Colorado Parks and Wildlife aquatic biologists is embarking on a quest to try to find a native subspecies of the cutthroat trout not seen since the early 1900s in Twin Lakes.
The effort to try and find the giant Yellowfin cutthroat trout in the Upper Arkansas River basin comes after greenback cutthroat trout – the state fish of Colorado that was believed extinct – were discovered in 2012 in the Bear Creek that runs into Colorado Springs from the Mt. Garfield area, outside of their native waters in the South Platte drainage.
CPW said a survey of the basin done in 2020 found more than 230 waterways that had no records of stocking or surveys, and that there was little documentation of the waters in the 1800s and beforehand. CPW says the project will move forward “until all potential waters identified have been surveyed and documented and the genetics from all fin clips have been analyzed.”
“We know the history of the Yellowfin and that it hasn’t been seen since before 1902,” Foutz said in a CPW news release. “But millions of trout, native and nonnative, have been back and forth across Colorado since before statehood. And if the history of the greenback and San Juan River cutthroat teach us anything, it’s that we should never stop looking.”
“…The species never leaves the lake except to spawn, and most of them spawn in the lake. It has never been seen in the river, and rarely in very deep water. … The flesh of the yellow-fin trout is very pale, and more watery than that of the other trout of Colorado. …. The color of the flesh may be due to the fact that it feeds on fishes rather than on crustacea. The ‘Greenback Trout’ feeds on crustacea and has very red flesh,” they went on.
Some were bred at the Leadville National Fish Hatchery in the 1890s and early 1900s, but millions more non-native trout that competed with the native cutthroat populations across Colorado were introduced across the state between 1914 and 1925, further pressuring the native fish.
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