Hi John,

I fully agree. Most of the people who would be doing the front line work, and the research, and such are good people motivated by trying to figure out what's going on. However, the final decision about what to act upon is made by people who's primary concerns are the bottom line, and that can skew the interpretation of the data before them. They are trying to manage a tourist industry, not a wild trout population (all the trout are introduced here; the rainbows came from the Russian River in California. Apparently some years ago there were trout ova returned from NZ to the Russian river to help restore the fishery there. The browns came from Scotland, I think?)

The south island is well known for it's brown trout fisheries. Taupo and Rotorua (the two major spots in the north island) are primarily rainbow fisheries, but there are lots of browns as well. The browns make for the photo opps in the advertising, but big rainbows are what most people catch when they get here!

Anyway, the thing is there's a history of people deciding the brown trout are the scurge and then trying to eliminate them in the thinking that this will restore the rainbows. It goes back to the early 1900s, and probably beyond. In the past, it has generally turned out that the problem was over popuation of trout which then ate up the food supply, resulting in the size of the trout reducing over the years. Although the report says there are "fewer trout", that usually means "fewer trophy sized trout", but that's an assumption on my part. Given the hit the smelt population took in Taupo a few years ago, and how that's been slow to recover by my understanding, it just seems to me that the historical reasons apply in this case.

Of course, that would mean that all fish should be caught, as the solution is usually to reduce to the overall trout population (both rainbows and browns), while letting the baitfish population recover! They did this before by netting out tones of fish then introducing smelt (the trout had eaten all the native fish that lived in the lake, which had few predators before). However, indescriminantly netting tonnes of trout which they are not allowed to sell (and so will just go into a dump somewhere) isn't going to go down well in todays world.

I didn't mean to disparage those doing the research. I just wonder if those doing the actual research are the ones making these suggestions that get implemented?

- Jeff