Judging from the article that PT posted, this is my opinion. I may be wrong but from what I read, the fact that 2 age classes of fish are missing means to me that the fish spawned but the eggs did not hatch.
”Concerns swirled, however, that prolonged drought and changing conditions might force Hot Creek into a sad curtain call.”
Trout eggs require upwelling spring water to keep sediment from suffocating the eggs and to keep the eggs at the right temperature especially in a stream with hot water inflows. In Wisconsin have had year class failures back in the 1980s and also more recently due to drought.
“We were missing two full age classes of fish,” said James Erdman, a Fish and Wildlife biologist. “There definitely were no signs of successful spawning across two years. It might take a decade to come back and recover from that.
I personally doubt that it will take a decade to recover from a 2 year class loss as long as no more year classes are lost. That is really the concern. I personally have lived through a loss of several year classes and it did not take 10 years to recover. That is hyperbole in my opinion, and is a self serving attempt to set up the need to stock the stream.
Drought dries up the springs and also lowers the water table so stream flows decrease both from the lack of springs, snow melt and direct rain. I suspect that the prolonged drought in California is the reason for lost year classes. That would be my guess. Once precipitation returns to normal, the fish population will also.
The question is then what to do until that occurs. During the 1980's drought, our DNR closed the trout season in our county and then the following year opened it for catch and release fishing only on all waters. That is an option that was not discussed in the article about Hot Creek. The alternative is stocking but that will dilute the genetics of the native fish as I discussed in another thread (see below).
What is important to me more than the fishing is the health of the fishery. Personally for me, I would rather close a fishery and let it it recover with all native trout than to add stockers. Apparently California fisheries didn’t have the ba**s to do that like the Wisconisin DNR did during our prolonged drought. The downside for the fishermen is that they lost the genetics of Hot Creek. They diluted the genetics of the native fish by 400%, meaning that the gene pools of fish in the stream are now only 20% native .
”When a group of 25 people surveyed the stream last September, 80 percent of the trout were identified as “planters.”
Our DNR chose to close the seasons and when fishing returns, there were some huge fish that have not been fished over for a while. The year of C&R after the closed season was one of the best for large trout in our local streams and rivers.
To me this is the most ironic quote in the article,
“In the Eastern Sierra, a lot of our waters don’t support wild trout,” he said. “So when you find one like the Upper Owens (River), Hot Creek and Rush Creek, we try to protect it.”
Is it only me that noted that they did not protect the effin' wild native trout population at all. They replaced them with planters who will survive but they are not the native trout whose genetic line has now been mongrelized. They are no longer a pure strain. They are whatever strain the hatchery was raising.
Read the post I made here to understand what happens to a native population when hatchery trout are planted.
https://www.theflyfishingforum.com/...estionnaire-trout-management.html#post1140444
) and the lot was mostly empty, weekdays.....it broke my heart....to see it go away.