What A Year Can Do

I have always been curious about growth rates in browns. People ask me how much can a brown grow during a year. I give them the standardized response. It depends on many factors. Genetics have a little to do with it but the overriding factor is how much food does that fish have to grow on. If there are lots of trout in a stream then there is less food and the trout will grow at a slower rate.

When I lived in Germany I was told by a fish manager there that trout grew at a slower rate there due to the streams being fed by the glaciers and the streams were colder than the streams in the United States. That same German fish manager told me that wild trout in Germany seldom grow larger than 20 inches.

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This brown was caught on a size 8 black wooly bugger with green crystal flash in a tiny stream in Southwestern Crawford County in 2008. This trout measured at an eye lash over 20 inches. It was released back in to the very unique hole. I took close up photos of the trout and noted a unique gill plate pattern.

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In 2009 this brown was caught in that same hole. We measured the trout and took a couple photos and let it go. The trout was caught on a blue fox spinner. It measured 22.5 inches.

Afterwards I compared the photos and gill plates and this trout was the exact same fish caught one year prior. It was caught within 10 inches of where it laid the year before.


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This trout was caught by my good friend Chien Goh on a large waterway in Richland County in 2011. The unique hook to his jaw was unmistakeable. Chien released the trout. I was the net man and saw the hole really well. That trout measured almost exactly 21 inches.


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This morning I returned to that exact same unique hole that Chien had caught his hook jawed male. The first cast I was rewarded with this sweet male brown. It measured 23.5 inches. A check of photos confirmed it. It was the exact same fish.

The next time someone asks me how much a brown trout grows a year I am going to confidently say. 2.5 inches a year.

Len -

I'm not clear on which of the above pix you are comparing to confirm that those are the same fishies.

The pix do raise a couple interesting questions, however.

First, is the spotting on both sides of a trout exactly the same or is the spotting on each side typically different than the other side ??

Second, can the spots on a trout change over time, not just a matter of getting larger as the trout grows, but can the pattern also change, for example with the fading of some spots and the emergence of new ones ??

Spots on trouts are like fingerprints, or so it seems to me. When you closely examine lots of trout pix it seems like the spotting of each fish is unique to that fish. That really struck home last summer when I caught several of the same trout from two times each to six times, for one that I ultimately named "Howard." But I always take fish pix from the same side, so I've never had pix of both sides of the same fish to compare as a starting point to answer the first question above. And I caught the fish over a relatively short time ( from a low of about half an hour to a max of about three months ), so I don't have any information on the second question.

Catching two or more fish in exactly the same place is a good starting point for wondering if you caught the same fish two ( or more ) times. But the final decision depends on the "fingerprints," or so it seems to me.

John

Fantastic. I will share this with my bro up in northern Utah. He goes mostly after cutties and rainbows up there, but browns come out of there in large sizes frequently. Thanks for a great post!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by JohnScott

...First, is the spotting on both sides of a trout exactly the same or is the spotting on each side typically different than the other side ??...

...But I always take fish pix from the same side, so I've never had pix of both sides of the same fish to compare as a starting point to answer the first question above. ...

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... I took pix of one brown and two rainbows from both sides so I could compare the spotting and answer my own question.

The spotting is different enough on each side on all three that you would not be able to identify any of them as the "same fish" based on the pix.

John