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CUTTHROAT FOR INLAND CUTTHROAT?


Byline: Gary Gerhardt Rocky Mountain News The Rocky Mountain News is a daily morning tabloid-format newspaper published in Denver, Colorado. It is owned by the E. W. Scripps Company. (Despite Scripps still running the paper, it's the only newspaper in the Scripps family not to have the corporate lighthouse logo on  

Summer snowflakes snowflakes

small patches of gray or white hair acquired after birth. Skin color is unchanged. See also achromotrichia, vitiligo.
 spit in the morning air as waves on Yellowstone Lake Yellowstone Lake

Lake, Yellowstone National Park, northwestern Wyoming, U.S. It lies at 7,731 ft (2,356 m) above sea level, the largest body of water in North America at so high an altitude. It is fed and drained by the Yellowstone River.
 rock the 30-foot boat like a toy in a bathtub.

At the controls, Jeff Lutch, a biologist with the National Park Service, fights to keep the craft from passing over a 300-foot-long net that Eric Reinertson, Brian Hertel and Meredith Burnett are hand-reeling on board.

They hope the net will contain mackinaw, or lake trout lake trout
 or Mackinaw trout or Great Lakes trout or salmon trout

Large, voracious char (Salvelinus namaycush) found widely from northern Canada and Alaska to New England and the Great Lakes, usually in deep, cool lakes.
 as they are more commonly called. Big ones - 10, 20 pounds or more - are full of eggs. The record is a 109-pound lunker lunk·er  
n. Informal
Something, especially a game fish, that is large for its kind.



[Origin unknown.]
 taken by a commercial fisherman in Canada.

But this isn't for sport.

The Park Service crew seines the lake because macs have been illegally dumped into what once was the premier inland cutthroat-trout fishery in North America North America, third largest continent (1990 est. pop. 365,000,000), c.9,400,000 sq mi (24,346,000 sq km), the northern of the two continents of the Western Hemisphere. .

Someone released the exotic lake trout apparently hoping to ``diversify'' the fishery. The presence of the fish wasn't confirmed until two years ago. Since then, six age classes have been found, leading experts to believe the sabotage might have happened 20 years ago.

``We patted ourselves on the back for decades that we kept Yellowstone Lake pure,'' said John Varley John Varley is the name of:
  • John Varley (painter) (1778–1842), English painter and astrologer
  • John Varley (author) (born 1947), American science fiction author
  • John Varley (banker) (born c.1956), British CEO of Barclays Bank
, the park's science director. ``Now the sport-fishing for cutthroats is in jeopardy.''

When they get to be 15 or 16 inches long, lake trout switch diets from plants and crustaceans to fish - and the cutthroat is one of the least competitive trout around.

In fact, researchers already have taken 12-inch cutthroats from the stomachs of some lake trout in Yellowstone Lake.

Aboard the Park Service boat, the net emerges slowly from the icy waters. The first fish that appears is a cutthroat.

``If they're alive, we get them back in the water as soon as we can,'' said Reinertson, who, with Hertel and Burnett, are employed for the summer by the Student Conservation Association.

Burnett quickly weighs the fish and tosses it into a bucket of water.

The net had been set three days earlier in 118 feet of water. When totally pulled in, 10 more fish are found - nine cutthroats and a sucker. No mackinaws.

``Right now we're doing a lot of experimenting trying to figure out exactly where the lake trout hang out,'' Lutch explained.

``It's going to start getting more critical as we head into the spawning season this fall because we really want to determine what areas those big females with thousands of eggs will be in to spawn.''

A prediction was made that within 30 years, the Years, The

the seven decades of Eleanor Pargiter’s life. [Br. Lit.: Benét, 1109]

See : Time
 number of cutthroat in Yellowstone Lake could drop from 2.5 million to 250,000 if nothing is done.

The recommendation: Determine the areas where the mackinaws spawn and use gill nets to drag them out.
COPYRIGHT 1996 Daily News
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright 1996, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.

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Title Annotation:Sports
Publication:Daily News (Los Angeles, CA)
Date:Sep 5, 1996
Words:451
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