WSU and rainbow trout
Published 10:40 am Tuesday, May 17, 2011
You don’t have to be a Cougar fan to like Eric Sorensen’s piece on trout in the summer edition of the Washington State University magazine.
Sorensen looks mostly at the rainbow and how hatchery plants have helped make it the world’s most popular fish.
It certainly is the most popular in Washington state, where the state likes to poison other fish to plant rainbows.
Sorensen looks at the WSU connection with rainbows, from people with Troutlodge — who produce a lot of hatchery fish — to geneticists who’ve found that the rainbows on the Elwha River on the state’s Olympic Peninsula have very good genes. (Meaning its a very wild strain.)
They’re getting ready to break the dams of the Elwha, and the expectation is that those great genes will revive a run of great steelhead as some of the rainbows head out to sea and then come back.
This is off Sorensen’s topic, but scientists have also told me that the Elwha had a run of Chinook that reached the 100-pound mark and that turning the Elwha back into a free running river could bring back some very big Chinook.
If you’d like to read Sorensen’s piece Click here.
