About 10 years ago I remember seeing a picture of a similar sized lake trout that the Park Service had removed from Yellowstone Lake. They said that one was about 27-28 years old if I recall, long before anyone acknowledged that lake trout existed in Yellowstone Lake, and if memory serves me correctly, I seem to recall that they said a lake trout that sized could eat a couple thousand cutthroat over the couse of a year. Just think how many cutthroat were saved by the 300,000 lake trout that were removed this year alone.
The couple times that I fished the Yellowstone River in the Park this past summer I noted a few more younger cutthroat trout, and of a couple differnt year age groups, than I’ve seen in the past few years. Actually, there were quite a lot of the smaller cutthroat. Nothing like it was years ago, but gradually getting better I think. Hopefully, there will be enough water next spring in the spawning tributary steams.
To paraphrase Steely Dan, “any news is good news”. That’s a heck of a mack; hopefully, the efforts to contain/diminish the lake trout population will continue to be successful. I remember reading about one scientist’s attempt at lake trout control by spreading gelatin in the water over supposed spawning grounds, hoping it would smother the eggs (and create the most disgusting side dish ever invented by mankind).
They are now using a combination of high tech and low tech methods on the lake trout intruders. Lakers are being caught, fitted with transponders, and released, then tracked by a number of tracking stations around the lake. The intent is to pinpoint the key spawning areas (since they are mass spawners), then send in the commercial netters. I heard very encouraging reports in early June about the success of those methods, and following reports showed even greater optimism about finally turning the corner on removing the lakers and saving the native cutthroats.
Lake Trout are not of the Salmon family that many trout are related to…these Lake Trout were somehow imported in to the water system by unknown individuals. They do not belong there and should be removed…
On another note, the Yellowstone National Park has a Super Volcano that is one of the most dangerous volcano’s on the planet Earth, as a caldera the volcano last erupted over 300,000 years ago and is 60,000 years over due for its next violent eruption that will wipe out almost everything west of the Mississippi River. In relation to Yellowstone, Mt St Helen eruption is just a fire cracker to what will happen when the Yellowstone caldera volcano erupts, the magna chamber is located right beneath Yellowstone Lake…
Just got back from there…incredible story of the last 3 major eruptions…and discussion led to this theory I had never heard… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
Apparently homo Sapiens as a species were down to less than 10,000 breeding pairs about 70,000 years ago due to a supervolcanic event. Interesting, if true…
I remember watching a show on Discovery Channel about super volcanoes. They mentioned that after the Toba eruption, the genetic bottleneck was so tight they were speculating that there were less than 30 breeding females on the planet.
