YNP is planning to use a nuke when a sniper rifle would do the job - please comment.

In a case of massive overreaction, NPS, Montana FWP, and the equivalent Wyoming agencies are planning to apply rotenone to Soda Butte Creek from its headwaters all the way to Ice Box Canyon in order to clear out a tiny population of invasive brook trout. If you've ever fished this section of Soda Butte, you should know it holds easily 50 to 1 cutthroats to brookies, and rotenone won't distinguish between the two and will completely destroy this fishery for years. It will also have serious negative consequences on lower Soda Butte (the famous section) because it takes a while for rotenone to dissipate. I suggest readers familiar with Soda Butte comment on this proposed plan.

They claim that electrofishing has failed to accomplish their goals. I don't buy it. I've never seen an electrofishing crew up there and I used to guide up there all the time.

Here is the News Release: http://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/news/y...utte-creek.htm

Here is the comment form: https://parkplanning.nps.gov/documen...cumentID=66094

Here are my comments:

To Whom:

While I am in favor of the removal of brook trout from upper Soda Butte Creek, I am STRONGLY opposed to the use of piscicides rather than more-precise methods of fish removal, in this instance probably meaning electrofishing. There are several reasons why I believe piscicides are a terrible idea in this case:

1.) The trout population in upper Soda Butte Creek, at least from Warm Creek downstream to Ice Box Canyon, is overwhelmingly composed of unhybridized cutthroat trout. I have been fishing this water since the 1990s and guiding on it since 2001, with my most recent guiding excursions on this section of stream happening last September. My own fishing and guiding experience has shown that very few cutthroats show any sign of hybridization with rainbows, probably due to the cascades in Ice Box Canyon. Moreover, my clients and I have caught fewer than ten brook trout between Warm Creek and Ice Box Canyon, and literally thousands of cutthroats. We have caught zero brook trout downstream of the closest road bridge to the NE Entrance to the park. While these experiences are not scientific, I do believe they are representative of the real distribution of brook trout in this portion of Soda Butte.

2.) By applying piscicides upstream of Ice Box Canyon, large numbers of cutthroat trout downstream will also be killed before the rotenone dissipates, regardless of what chemicals are used in an attempt to dissipate the chemical. Most of these will be juvenile cutthroat trout that hatch in Ice Box Canyon and eventually down-migrate into the downstream meadows. Thus the application of piscicide upstream of Ice Box Canyon will have negative impacts on fish populations downstream.

I believe the preferred alternative is to use a selective means of removing brook trout. Between the YNP boundary and Ice Box Canyon Soda Butte Creek lacks substantial tributaries that could serve as brook trout refuges. Therefore, systematic electroshocking would be an excellent tool at removing brook trout without much unintended cutthroat mortality. Moreover, brook trout and cutthroats are visually distinct, much more so than cutthroats and rainbows, so removal of shocked brook trout would require only cursory visual inspection and thus be efficient.

If initial shocking surveys suggest extreme numbers of brook trout upstream of Warm Creek, small-scale piscicide application in these areas (particularly in tributaries of Soda Butte Creek near Cooke City) might be required, but I STRONGLY encourage NPS, FWP, and other agencies to attempt brook trout removal throughout upper Soda Butte Creek via a selective method first.

An additional note I didn't include in my comments but should have: there are numerous other examples of streams in Yellowstone featuring abundant brook trout populations that fail to influence areas downstream. In the Yellowstone drainage, Antelope, Tower, and Blacktail Creeks all have fish populations composed entirely or mostly of brook trout, and yet they are only incidental catches in the river. Same with the Gardner River, the Firehole except for its headwaters, and the Gibbon downstream of Norris. These waters are all predominately brook trout upstream, with almost none downstream. The same factors are present in the Lamar drainage to preclude brookies from out-competing cutts further down, namely warmer and bigger water.

Walter,
Have you heard back or gotten any feedback/new info?
Thanks,
Byron

Hearing more and more of this kind of crap every year.

The comment period is open for a month. I doubt they'll reply to my comments or say anything about what they hear before that.

This is a big change from Grayling Creek. That one was almost entirely overrun with non-natives, in fact I doubt if there was a single pure-strain westslope in it before they killed the nonnatives. Upper Soda Butte is VAST majority cutthroat, and cutts and brookies can't interbreed like rainbows and cutts. There are a lot of other drainages in/around YNP with brook trout up high and something else further downstream. A lot of the Yellowstone R tribs have brook trout, and yet they're only occasional catches in the main river. Same with the Gardner. Headwaters are all brookies and there are very few in the lower six or eight miles. The park should be spending their rotenone budget somewhere like the upper Gibbon (they have discussed this), which would be great westslope cutt and grayling habitat and now holds 95% micro-brookies.

I have really enjoyed fishing Soda butte. Nice fish in a tiny stream.
Not sure of the name of the stretch I like, but it is quite a ways upstream. It is before it runs into a pretty steep canyon.

If you were upstream of the canyon, that's the section that will be wiped out. I bet you have never caught more than 1-2 brookies there even on days when you catch thirty or forty fish, have you?

I made my comments be heard even though I only fished it once in the last four years.
Trout are all fun to catch no matter you find them.
Bob.

I can't speak for whether removal of the brookies is needed (i.e., does the number present threaten native cutthroat populations?), but I can tell you electrofishing is not an effective way to remove fish from a watershed if you need to remove them all. It just never gets them all (and you only have to miss two to have not solved your problem). I've helped with a number of electrofishing surveys related to native cutthroat restoration in Rocky Mountain National Park. These were population surveys--we were just trying to find out how many fish of what species were present. We always make 2 passes through a stretch of stream. What we catch in pass 1 is temporarily removed and held in fish baskets. There are usually fewer fish caught on the 2d pass, but not necessarily a lot fewer. For purposes of estimating the population, the biologist puts the data in a spreadsheet that applies a statistical model to estimate how many fish are actually present.

They could conceivably reduce and control the brookie population with an ongoing electrofishing effort. But why not--I suspect they reason--solve the problem once and for all and after a few years have a self-sustaining native fish population not threatened by invasive brook trout? Their draft CE says they have been electrofishing for 2 decades in an attempt to control the brook trout population, but it has continued to expand. Notwithstanding your observations that you have never seen them doing so and that there are few brookies relative to the cutthroat population, I suggest you seek out their actual data in support of your comments to the draft CE.

And in theory, at least, the rotenone can be applied with minimal effect downstream. They don't have to wait for it to dissipate. They have a neutralizing agent they can introduce at the bottom of the target stretch that stops the carnage downstream. Having said that, there have apparently been failures, including the disastrous 1962 poisoning of the Green River recounted by Anders Halverson in his book, An Entirely Synthetic Fish.

Walter, I go up there every year the first week in October . Three years ago I seen a shocking crew from the Forest service above the picnic site above Ice Box. They said they were after the Brooks but had not seen any, just one 9 to 15 in cut after another from what I seen. Too much overkill!!