In western US waterways, invasive and voracious brook trout are outcompeting native species – but a modified variant could tip the scales
n a golden morning in early October, two graduate students from New Mexico State University plunge into the icy current of Leandro Creek. The small waterway flows through the 550,000 acre Vermejo park ranch, a reserve in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and the pair are in search of an unusual fish.Ecology, wears a pair of worn grey waders and carries two eight-gallon buckets, one full of water, the other, of scientific gear: test tubes, an electronic scanner and surgical implements.
How this beautiful interloper from eastern North America got here is unclear, beyond that it was part of a human-aided diaspora that released brook trout into high-altitude lakes and creeks across the west. The brookies’ voracious appetites and rapid sexual maturation have spelled trouble not only for native trout such as bull, rainbow, California golden, and cutthroat, which they out-compete, but also for a host of other aquatic organisms, including frogs and salamanders.
Researchers are still trying to understand if Trojan trout behave enough like wild male trout to convince females to breed with them, as well as whether they can thrive enough in their new environment to tip the scales in the Rio Grande cutthroats’ favour. But the hope is that the imposters will excise brookies from stream systems, without the need to bomb them with an indiscriminate chemical agent.Despite the method’s promise, it raises questions about ethics and unforeseen outcomes.
Fish culturist Tom Lindenmuth oversees operations at the Hayspur hatchery in Idaho as trays of eggs await shipping across the country. Photographs: Jeremy Miller Back at the Vermejo reserve, well over half the fish the team have counted so far are of the Trojan variety. Field makes a quick swipe of one of the fish with a scanner, which returns a beep. This indicates that the fish contains a PIT tag, no larger than a grain of rice, which contains information such as where and when the fish was hatched and when it was released.
Bekoff argues, however, that the approach being taken with the Trojan trout treats the significant alteration and potential suffering of animals too blithely. “If someone said to me: ‘We’re going to turn you from a male to a female’, I’d say: ‘I don’t want to be.
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