High in the Sierra Nevada, cold creeks lead to a lake that has quietly sheltered one of the west's rarest native fish. The Lahontan cutthroat trout rarely makes the headlines, but the story of its local recovery is a classic conservation mystery that involves a threatened native, an encroaching non-native competitor, and the question of whether fixing the first can really address the second. A 2012 study titled “Effect of brook trout removal from a spawning stream on an adfluvial population of Lahontan cutthroat trout,” led by U.S. Geological Survey researchers and published in the North American Journal of Fisheries Management, suggests the answer lies in a surprisingly simple start: removing the invader and seeing what happens to the young.
Why a native trout lost ground
