To survey aquatic life, the brook trout crew stuns them temporarily, puts fish in a bucket, and measure them before releasing them back into the wild. Photo: Katie Myers / Blue Ridge Public Radio / Grist
As climate change reshapes the Blue Ridge, Appalachia’s native trout are losing ground, but a dedicated group of biologists and fly fishers are working hard to help ensure the future of the beautiful, vital fish. In an articlle in Grist entitled “Where the Appalachian brook trout vanish, something human goes missing, too” Katie Myers outlines the problems, as well as the efforts to solve them:
Researchers have observed startling declines in places like Shenandoah National Park in southwestern Virginia, where one study found they plummeted by 50 percent in nearly all of the park’s 90 streams in just the last three decades. Those who had seen hundreds of them in some waterways in the 1990s have been shocked to see single digit populations today. In at least three cases, brook trout had vanished entirely. Scientists worry that the fish, which is not federally listed as endangered or even threatened, could be pinched out at the southern end of its range as waterways grow warmer.
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