Strains of Browns...Help!

[only adipose]

I know that our North America Browns are a genetic mess, but looking at these two fish I am seeing some different parentage. Or at the very least, different interpretation of genes. I am hoping that someone can tell me more about key look fors of different strains brown trout. Which strains are we looking at here? They came from the same stream on the same day in the same section. Does anyone have better examples to highlight different features? Are there Physical features other than color I should be looking for? HELP.

 

[Ard]

Both look like Loch Leven trout to me with different pigmentation / spot patterns.

Ard

 

[only adipose]

What tells you that? How do you know? ha.. I agree with you because I know where they come from, but someone was trying to talk me out of it. I can see it with the top one without a doubt, but what is it about the bottom fish that tells you?

 

[Ard]

Now I'm questioning my word on this, I'm looking at some old photos, I'll come back and edit in or post more in a while.

Ok, after some old pictures and a look at some reference material "Trout" by Judith Stolz & Judith Schnell" (highly recommended) I will say that the top has all the looks of a Loch Leven trout but the bottom is of German ancestry. The spots are not always the final word on identification but a good place to start.

Generally the German fish will have a blood red adipose fin and much more yellow on the belly. The spots are more dense wiith many surrounded by a red halo.

All my brown trout photos are on slides but I have a few that are scanned. These are German from Spring Creek PA.





Going with the 'spots' identification method, this one could go either way but perhaps a L. Leven.



Another German;


And another, as you see the spot pattern differs so greatly that it can be hard to call in some cases.


Funny, I hardly recognize the guy in the picture, Alaska aged me buddy.

 

[only adipose]

SOOO German? This fish had milky color like the Loch Leven which may mean absolutely nothing.

I may not know much, but I had a pretty good day.

 

[Ard]

That is what I would have to guess. At any rate those are beauties and I wouldn't lose sleep over the taxonomy questions.

 

[milt spawn]

You don't need help, you need a netman! That second fish is heavy. :thumbsup: milt

 

[sweetandsalt]

There is a wonderful book, "The Complete Brown Trout", Cecil Heacox, full of fascinating history and biology about our now, but not always, beloved Salmo trutta. Bottom line is the first eyed eggs came to these shores in the mid 1800's from Loch Leven, Scotland. There is one repository of pure Loch Leven's extant and that is in a waterfall protected location in the southern portion of Yellowstone (do your own homework to find out where). These fish are characterized by not having any red spots and having larger and fewer black spots than their few years latter, Black Forest, von Behr cousins. The German fish have typically smaller and more plentifully black spots with red spots distributed along their flanks. All the browns we fish for in North America are mixtures of these two strains and can exhibit any and all combinations of color features. The degree of how buttery or bright they are I though more habitat driven but I have caught silvery fish and deeply colored ones in the same stream not far apart, so who knows. I know this, they are less prone to domestication than rainbows, live longer, grow bigger and are somehow more rewarding to fool on a dry fly. I love them.

 

[dean_mt]

I think I checked that book out of the library last winter, I may have to find it again.

I have always understood that the first Browns planted in the US were in the Pere Marquette River in Michigan. Actually they stocked in the Baldwin River, a small trib of the PM. When I used to go up there for occasional work and fishing the old timers always referred to them as "German Browns." Now of course this does not mean that their origin was Germany.

But John Holt claims the first eggs that came across the ocean were shipped by von Behr, but he doesn't point out the origin of the eggs.

Brown Trout | Michigan Sea Grant

Oh, and nice fish!

 

[jbird]

Those are some beauts! There has been so much genetic metling in hatcheries and cross breeding in watersheds that I dont know if there are any true strains of either left in America. Remember too that this is spawning season, those same fish will probably look completely deifferent in May.

 

[sweetandsalt]

Heacox, a NY State fisheries biologist had all the early records from Cold Spring and correspondences with the Scottish and German fish culturists responsible for our two now largely intertwined strains of original trout imports. I do recall that Yellowstone, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York where the earliest stocking locations. S.trutta has a native range spreading from Iceland in the West to part of Atlantic watershed Asia in the East. Some giant strains attaining weights of 100 pounds were native to some Bavarian lakes and the Caspian Sea. They embody considerable color and distinct adaptive variations much like our similarly glacially isolated and land locked strains of rainbow/cutthroats as well as anadromus "Sea Trout" populations. There are Northern European and Scandinavian anglers who prize sea trout above their closely related Atlantic salmon cousins who often share the same river much as North Americans who favor steelhead relative to other Pacific salmonids. The only two species assigned to the Salmo (leaper) genus, salmon and sea trout bright from the salt look an awful lot alike save for the thinner, stiffer caudal peduncle of the further oceanic ranging salmon. It is for these two species that our fly fishing tackle and techniques was originally developed for and evolved to the passion we embrace today.

 

[sweetandsalt]

I should add that in addition to Heacox's seminal book, re-published by Lyon's Press I believe, other great sources of information about browns and other fish with adipose fins is the great Ernie Schwiebert's "Trout" and anything by Dr. Robert Behnke.

Most of my personal favorite rivers have both wild reproducing (not native nor stocked) browns and rainbows in residence. One, The Henry's Fork, only has rainbows. Silver Creek too, only had rainbows until a famous individual took it upon himself to pour a pail of brown trout fingerlings into this illustrious spring creek in the dark of night. Now 30% of the population is browns...up to 30+"...but only single digit % of the angler's catch. The Missouri was stocked with browns until the early 1950's when Montana decided to focus on more highly harvestable domestic rainbows. The only native rainbows in Montana are up in the Kootenai R. The Clark Fork is Columbia watershed too but upstream migration is blocked by falls. Regrettably, all other rainbow populations in Montana, like just about everywhere else East of their native range are "junk" genetic strains of selectively breed for hatchery domestic behavior as well as early sexual maturity and short lifespan feed-me-a-pellet trout. Wait a minuet! I caught a gorgeous 23" rainbow that tore me into my backing...that's "junk?" Well, I have too and I love them too but imagine the lost potential of native strain, non-migratory, late sexually maturing, long life span fish like originally resided in the McCloud and some other California rivers? There is a relatively pure strain of them in the upper Delaware River (introduced in the 1880's) and a pure strain in Argentine Patagonian rivers (imported in 1910). These fish have the potential to grow to well over the 23" size that is a specimen of note in most of our non-lake connected trout rivers.

Anyway, I should not be bemoaning the state of trout genetics so early in the day. Subconsciously, I wish I was rigging up my NRX#4 to cast an early season BWO on a good sized spring feed arroyo in southern Patagonia. It too has both rainbows and browns sipping on its weed bed current seams; far from their original home waters.

 

[Poke 'Em]

To sort of add to what sweetandsalt said, at this point in America, there's almost no chance that those browns are anything but a mix of who-knows-what original European strains. Now, they may express more phenotypical characteristics of one strain over another, and I'm not an expert on the European trouts, so I'll leave that determination to others.

 

[sweetandsalt]

That is accurate. Even if a trout "looks" Loch Leven or German it is surely an admixture of the two strains...and who says either of them were "pure" strains upon arrival on our continent in the 1880's? We have, in more recent years, imported Seeforellen for experimental stocking in the Great Lakes with modest results (well, not modest if you hook a 50 lb. brown while steelhead fishing). Below is an image of a fine, dry fly caught brown from this past season that manifests the classic coloration of a Loch Leven but lives in a river where the next brown you hook may be resplendent in red spots. Both are just fine with me.

Missouri River brown trout from near Wolf Creek, Montana

 

[rasputinj]

There is a wonderful book, "The Complete Brown Trout", Cecil Heacox, full of fascinating history and biology about our now, but not always, beloved Salmo trutta. Bottom line is the first eyed eggs came to these shores in the mid 1800's from Loch Leven, Scotland. There is one repository of pure Loch Leven's extant and that is in a waterfall protected location in the southern portion of Yellowstone (do your own homework to find out where). These fish are characterized by not having any red spots and having larger and fewer black spots than their few years latter, Black Forest, von Behr cousins. The German fish have typically smaller and more plentifully black spots with red spots distributed along their flanks. All the browns we fish for in North America are mixtures of these two strains and can exhibit any and all combinations of color features. The degree of how buttery or bright they are I though more habitat driven but I have caught silvery fish and deeply colored ones in the same stream not far apart, so who knows. I know this, they are less prone to domestication than rainbows, live longer, grow bigger and are somehow more rewarding to fool on a dry fly. I love them.

Good info, learned something new today. I will need to pickup the book.