Ep 160: Lahontan Cutthroat Trout, with Nick Buckmaster
Nick Buckmaster is a fisheries supervisor with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. In this episode, we talk about all things Lahontan cutthroat trout. We discuss what his job entails, other desert species such as pupfish, the evolution of Lahontan cutthroats, the various morphs, how to fish for them, and much more.
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Katie
You're listening to the Fish Untamed Podcast, your home for fly fish in the backcountry. This is episode 160 with Nick Buckmaster on the Lahontan cutthroat trout. Well, I start every episode by getting a background on how my guests got into the outdoors and specifically into fishing. So, I know you said beforehand that you're a big fish nerd. Tell me how you got introduced to the outdoors in the first place.
Nick
My grandma owned a house on the Thompson River in British Columbia and I grew up catching trout out of the backyard and just never got over it. I think I got my first one when I was two or three and I've been obsessed with fishing ever since. As soon as I realized I could get a job and get a degree with fish, I never looked back.
Katie
Was that on a spin rod I assume that you started?
Nick
I started with spinning rods, but I was tying my own flies by the time I was around 10 or 11. I was a total fisheries nerd from get-go. I remember reading through the old angler's atlas or fly fishing magazines trying to figure out how to tie the flies and get the patterns right. I think I took fur and feathers off every animal I could possibly catch, like my neighbor's horses. I still have flies tied with old dog hair.
Katie
Were they good?
Nick
I caught a couple of fish on a streamer that I tied once, but those fish would have eaten anything. I caught some on a bear hook out of the same lake, so it doesn't really speak to much.
Katie
Yeah, I remember the first flies I tied, before I even, it was before I fly fished before I knew what a good fly looked like I just knew it was like feathers and fur on a hook and I saved a couple of those and looking back at them I'm like yikes. I'm sure they still catch a bluegill or something but they're pretty hideous and I have to imagine most flies tied by like an eight to ten year old look just about the same.
Nick
Yeah oh definitely I mean you could put those things on a wall plaque and call it a jackalope and probably people would be perfectly happy with it.
Katie
Now did you grow up in a fishing family or what Like what got the bug into you?
Nick
Uh, my grandpa fished a lot. Um, and so did my dad. So they, they were both pretty supportive when I was younger, getting me out whenever they could. But a lot of it was just, you know, I just fell in love with it. I mean, I remember when I was really young, driving up crack of dawn with my dad and we'd just go fishing on the lake and gosh, sometimes we caught things, sometimes we didn't, but we always, we'd always go make breakfast burritos, eat them in the car and take off.
Katie
Was it primarily trout or did you have other species around that you were going after as well?
Nick
I started with trout. I got into bass and warm water fish down the road. When I was in college, there were some pretty good striper fish outside of Sacramento where I went. I've always just kind of fished for everything that I possibly can. I went through some phases where I would pick a game fish and target that for a year. I went after white bass and channel catfish. You just target a fish and chase it.
Katie
I did a little reading ahead of time and I don't quite remember what exactly your degree was, but I know it was related to fisheries, biology, that kind of thing. What was your major and where did you take that?
Nick
Well, I got actually, yeah, I got a couple. I got a wildlife and fisheries conservation biology degree from Davis. I also picked up a geology degree and a master's in ecology, all from Davis. I pretty much got in there and then they finally kicked me out after three degrees. But it was just all kind of tied together in my head. I should learn about the habitat and I should learn about the rocks and the fish. Yeah I just got into it.
Katie
Now you've obviously transitioned that into I would assume the career that most people who go into that are wanting. Is that still a viable option for people? I've heard that that's a harder field to get into because like so many people want to do that. Is it still viable option for people or would you recommend a different route for somebody who's got a passion for fish these days?
Nick
That's a tough question. It's still viable. There's still ways up. I recently hired a person who was in their mid-20s who had come up through this fisheries programs and systems. I think it gets tough because there's points in the career path where you usually have to choose between a salary and staying in the field. It comes down to dedication. There's always somebody qualified, willing to do the job. It's tough. It is a tough career to navigate, but it is still viable. I mean, I worked my way up through it over the last decade or so, and I would say it's, I've never really questioned that decision.
Katie
What are you giving up when you leave the field for a salary? You know, what does, what does the job become at that point?
Nick
You get stuck in an office setting. That's usually the career choice. You move from, say, fisheries biology to water policy and permitting or you know you end up doing more bureaucratic pencil pushing or you know even shifting over to data science if you're really stuck on the science side and less of the environmental fisheries component of the job. There's always you know there's always sacrifices sometimes the stars line up and you end up with the perfect job. I mean I spent years waiting for the fisheries biologist to retire out here and pushing paper and just waiting sitting there and then when that person finally left I shot into the job but it takes a little bit of luck.
Katie
Is there a version of the office job that does keep you semi connected to the science going on? I know you said data science I don't know what all that entails but like are you doing things that feel or is the person who's stuck in an office doing things that feel disconnected from the actual science being done on the ground or is there a way to kind of keep your hands in it where you're still kind of analyzing things about the fishery and and maybe making strides in a field that you still feeling connected to it I guess?
Nick
Yeah there definitely are. You can you can find jobs and I had one for a couple of years that was pretty policy heavy and dealing with a lot of meetings but at the same time I was doing and helping out with fisheries work and managing the fisheries databases and stuff. Like it is a, there are opportunities to blend it, but it usually takes a little bit of flexibility from both the supervisor and the scientist side. And on the data science side, you know, I've had friends who have gotten their degrees in fisheries and then ended up working in healthcare because the statistical skills you need to do advanced, you know, fisheries biology translate pretty well to just about any other field. So it's like you get so developed in the mathematics side you can then get a job anywhere and when you get that point in life where you want a real job with a salary, a lot of times you make that sacrifice. You're like, "I actually want to buy a house one day."
Katie
So what is a day in your life? Like I'm sure it probably varies based on the season, but what are some of the things that you do in your job?
Nick
Well, so I'm a fishery supervisor, which is a blend of contract administration, budget stuff, paper writing, analysis, reviewing resumes, and then field work. Tomorrow I'm getting up at 6 in the morning and we're going to be, well 5.30, and we're leaving the office at 6 and we're going to be setting gill nets all day. Then we're going to come back, we're going to pull the otoliths, analyze some fish, generate some growth curves. So it's, I feel like my job these days is a pretty good blend of being able to kind of direct the programs to figure out, okay, these are the questions we need to answer, I'm going to go find some funding, I'm going to move in this direction, try to improve and better manage or restore our fisheries out here and then actually getting to go do that on occasion. It's a little less hands-on than jobs I've had in the past. Three years ago, I was doing field biology where I was out 70 nights a year in the back country living out of my tent chasing trout. That was a dream job, but at some point, you just get tired of being cold.
Katie
Yeah, I feel you. I have a lot of field work in my job and when it's good, it's good, but when it's bad, it's bad.
Nick
Yeah.
Katie
And it can switch from one to the other very quickly too, so I definitely feel you there.
Nick
One too many mornings with ice inside your waders and you're like, "Oh, boy howdy."
Katie
What kinds of things are you currently studying? You said you're placing gill nets. What will you use that information for?
Nick
Well, so this is springtime right now in the eastern Sierras and we're starting to do our surveys before the major lakes open for fishing. So in the wintertime, in the fall, we stock what we call sub-catchable fish, which are fish that are expected to grow up to a larger size before the opener. 30 to 40 years ago what we would go out and do is look to see if those fish were actually achieving our target sizes and try to track the growth over time. We're gonna be going out and tracking fish growth, looking to see how they're doing, how those fisheries have done through the winter if there was any winter kill we'll pull some of those fish back and look at we'll sacrifice them age them look to see what their growth was over winter if they are the same fish we stocked that fall or winter that's kind of the standard operating procedure that we've we've done out here but haven't done for a while is just the pre-survey see how everything's looking we'll probably do ten or so lakes this spring and just yeah see how see what people can expect on opening day. The idea is to come out before the fishing opener and say look these lakes are doing really well you know if you want to catch a lot of fish go here if you want to catch big fish go here.
Katie
Yes as anglers we appreciate that work because it's nice to know what you're getting into when you go somewhere. Selfishly I wanted to ask you because I'm in the world of academia you know still research based but probably different than kind of a state-based program. What determines what kinds of things you're looking at because you know for us it's you know I'm not on the grant writing side of things, but it seems like you know what you can get funded for. You're trying to come up with projects that you can get funding for and it's you know for the greater good of whoever is giving you the money I guess. But as a state employee what what kind of determines what is being studied or researched at any given time?
Nick
Well so as a that's a good question. My program has a couple of different positions. One's funded for things like threatened and threatened species recovery and dedicated environmental review. It's a joint position that deals with a couple of things. Then the rest of our positions follow a pattern laid out in the North American method of conservation. I'm drawing a blank on this.
Katie
The North American model of wildlife conservation?
Nick
Yeah, that's it. Sorry. I was like, "Dang it. I've got a camera on me and I can't remember."
Katie
That's a lot of words.
Nick
Essentially, it's the idea that the users pay for what they get. And so I've got a position that's funded by fishing license sales. And that job manages the fishery and I work with them and we do our best to make fishing better. And any questions we can come up with that kind of meet or fulfill that mission is something we can do. And that job really focuses on sustainable fishing. So managing without stocking. How do we harness the intrinsic potential of these ecosystems and generate as much good fishing as we possibly can? What are the variables we need to look at and what species of fish do we need to have to make it happen? And so that's, those are a lot of the questions that we look at. And then the kind of final component is the endangered species recovery part. And there's a provision of the Endangered Species Act federally that calls for funding to recover and restore endangered fish. It's under section six of the ESA. And we will get special funded projects for things like endangered desert fish recovery. I work a lot with desert fish and pup fish and dace and chub and stuff. We get kind of one-off funding pods to do restoration projects in that world as well. So those are kind of the three tiers we get, like dedicated funds, fishing license funds, endangered species funds.
Katie
You brought up the pup fish there and I know we're going to spend a lot of time talking about the Lahontan cutthroat trout, but I did have on my list to ask you about the pup fish because I don't know a lot about it but I know it's kind of a unique species in terms of like how small its distribution is. I don't know if it's the same pup fish that I've heard of from like Death Valley but I'll let you kind of tell me about it more. I just want to know about the pup fish and what what you're working on with it.
Nick
Well that's actually a good question because my region includes Death Valley National Park. We we manage the area surrounding it and we also manage the area around Bishop and in that whole stretch we have six native types of pupfish. They're this desert endemic that really epitomizes the extremophile of fish. They can tolerate water that's fresh, water that's saltier than seawater. They can live in water that's freezing and water that's 110. And so we've got six or seven, depending on how you break them apart, different populations of these fish or species and subspecies spread across the landscape. The ones near Bishop are really fun taxa to talk about, the Owens pupfish. They've been isolated in this area for like three-something million years, which is longer than the Sierra Nevadas have existed in their current form as a mountain range. So the joke we always make is, "Oh, they're older than the mountains." But the reality is they were probably formed about the time the Sierra Nevada were separated. And they, at one point, were declared extinct, and then the last remaining population was rediscovered and rescued by one of my predecessors in a couple of buckets in the late 1960s. And we've been managing them in a kind of triage way ever since. But they're really a unique fish. I mean, they're beautiful. The males turn this vibrant blue and set up breeding territories across the shallow shelves. They're just a really-- they're a fascinating kind of fish, that's for sure. But definitely prone to predation by non-native fish. That's their Achilles heel. If you put a bass in there, you don't have pup fish, and that's largely due to the fact that they've been the only fish in these environments for so long that they've lost the ability to coexist with predators. So it's the tradeoff between they can live where nobody else lives, but the flip side is they kind of have to live there too because they can't talk to anyone else.
Katie
Yeah, that was kind of maybe answers my next question, which was going to be, you know, are they endangered just by nature of the fact that their distribution is so small, there's just not a lot of places they live or do they face other threats to like you know are they happy and healthy but just in a very small area and population or are they actively trying to you know hang on tight in face of other external threats yes
Nick
it depends on the species because it's it's really both Owens pup fish are their watershed is great habitat for both trout and bass and that means that those two non-native predators that people love to fish and a big part of my job is to manage and promote those fisheries, completely extirpate pupfish where they co-occur. And so those fish are relegated to these isolated habitats that we actively try to keep non-native fish out of or they're just so extreme that non-native game fish can't survive. I mean we're talking a couple inches of water that gets up to 105 degrees and is saltier in seawater. That's kind of the niche those guys are in. The kind of opposite end of the spectrum are some pupfishes down south here near Death Valley where you have an entire species that's only present in a mile of stream or less, a tiny springhead. And that taxa has been in there since the ice age. They've not bred with anything else. They're just kind of stuck. And then, you know, the third type of pupfish are what we have in the Amargosa River, which is a wild and scenic drainage that feeds into Death Valley. It's 15 miles or so wetted habitat and that is teeming with pupfish. There's millions of them in there. So that's kind of the, you know, that's the ice age version of what these isolated fish came from. And it's really neat to get in there. If you ever get the chance, go out at Tecopa. It's really fun to just see all the pupfish cruising around.
Katie
Is there a quick but interesting explanation for how this species came to be beyond just they adapted to an extreme environment and nothing else was ever able to come in and compete for that same place?
Nick
Well I mean the taxa evolved on the Atlantic coast in salt marshes which is where they really kind of developed and got that extreme habitat because those are the salt pans that evaporate out they get really cold in the winter really hot in the summer and over the last 20 or so million years they've moved from the Atlantic Gulf of Mexico coast across the west as the crust has pulled apart and this area is prone is part of the Great Basin crustal extension if you want to google it you'll probably get a better explanation than I could give you but the center part center west part of North America is slowly ripping itself apart and as it's done that the climate Scott and wetter and drier and hotter and colder and this feces has moved from the coast, the Gulf of Mexico, all the way across to here in California. As everything else has happened and all these different changes have occurred, they've co-occurred with a bunch of other fish species and then the other fish species usually wink out and you're left with this one super tolerant species, the taxa.
Katie
Okay, I'm glad I asked because that is not what I guessed. That's not where I would have guessed that they came from.
Nick
Yeah. just survivors as like the continent has torn itself apart they've just not cared.
Katie
That's really interesting and you said you can go view them like you can go see them in the water like I assume you you don't fish for them because I feel like being such a an at-risk species and I get the impression they're pretty small too but I assume they're not like a game fish of any kind but you could see them?
Nick
You can go see them there's there's good exhibits in Death Valley National Park the area around Shoshone village out by Pahrump, Nevada Nevada has some good viewing ponds. There's some areas around Bishop where they can be seen. Depending on the setup, Devil's Hole has some pretty good viewing areas out there and Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. There's definitely places where you can see them and yeah, the biggest ones are maybe three inches.
Katie
Okay.
Nick
But I will say we were doing a project out here once where we came across somebody who was targeting a non-listed, relatively abundant species of pupfish with a fly rod. He was microfishing. He had like a size 40 fly on and was trying to catch one. So there is a subset of folks who will target them.
Katie
So it's not illegal?
Nick
It's not. It depends on the species.
Katie
But for the one he was targeting, it was legal for him to be fishing for those?
Nick
It was legal for him to be fishing. It was an Amargosa pupfish. It was not protected. It was actually hilarious because we were joking when we saw the fishing rod that he was lost. He wasn't. He knew exactly what he was trying to do.
Katie
You know I should talk to somebody on microfishing at some point I don't know anyone who does it but I've read you're probably in like Trout Unlimited's magazine about it and it is it's probably not for me but it's really fascinating what some people will do and what they'll catch and the techniques they have to do to get you know a darter to come out from under a rock or something like it's it's pretty interesting.
Nick
It's wild I mean I've never seen anybody come after puff fish with a rod before.
Katie
Well good luck to him I hope he was successful that day and got a couple because that's yeah that's just something I will never experience I'm sure. Moving on to Lahontan cutthroats because it's kind of how I came across your name I don't know where I read about you I must have come across your name online but you seem to be like the Lahontan guy in in your area so I'll maybe let you kind of get started with you know what you would consider good introduction to Lahontan cutthroat trout and then we'll kind of go from there you know I'd like to know about their life history and things like that so give me your 30,000 foot view of like what the Lahontan is.
Nick
Well, it's interesting that I came across this Lahontan guy. I would argue that there's definitely people who are more qualified for that. But I manage the Walker Basin in California, which is kind of the southernmost extent of Lahontan cutthroat trout. Lahontan cutthroat trout are just wild. The 30,000 foot view is they're the biggest inland trout in North America. They get bigger than bull trout than any other non-anadromous fish. Historically, these fish got to the size of Chinook salmon. And they're really the epitome of desert trout. They're native to the state of Nevada, the fringing areas in California and Oregon, and they're just, their best way to describe them would be a fish that can tolerate, a trout that can tolerate high levels of dissolved solids and temperatures to the point that most other trout would struggle or can't. Along with those traits, they end up being hyper-predacious. Their digestive system is developed in a way that actually kind of maximizes or pushes them into consuming large food. They're a piscivore. That's how they get so large. For anybody who's a real hardcore fish nerd, the number of pyloric caeca they have in their stomach, which are outpockets, is like custom set for piscivory. And they just are this wonderfully tolerant large fish. The only downside we have managing them from a fisheries standpoint is they evolve in isolation. So you see a lot of the same problems you see with puff fish. They don't tolerate non-native fish too well. And the places where they do the best habitat they have is actually suitable for things like brook trout or rainbow trout, which are out competing. Brook trout don't get as large. We're in the process of removing, we actually just finished up the removal of brook trout from a LCT stream. And the biggest brook trout we got out of the creek was seven inches, but there was 10,000 of them, whereas there's only something like a thousand cutthroat trout in there. But the cutthroat trout gets to 16, 17 inches. So the densities of these fish can be pretty low. flip side is they get really large. And the other nice thing that I always kind of tell people from a fishing standpoint with cutthroat trout is every study that's ever been done in terms of their selectiveness in the creel or whether anglers are likely to catch them, these things are ridiculously easy to catch. They're like ten times easier than brown trout, they're five times easier than rainbows. I mean I've fished a section of stream that we netted off to make sure no fish left and I think I caught ten cutthroat and one brook trout and then we shocked like 90% broke trout. The cutthroat were just so aggressive in terms of hammering the flies and just flying out of the banks. So from a fisheries management standpoint, they're really good fish. I mean, they get big, they're easy to catch, they're tough, so they can handle a lot of habitat problems. But what we struggle with, at least in my area, is keeping out the non-native fish, the fish that are really well evolved for high densities and are really hyper aggressive with each other. Whereas cutthroat trout tend to not be aggressive with other trout, they're aggressive towards food.
Katie
Yeah, so maybe you can explain kind of the mechanism of how this works. Maybe it's because they're not piscivorous until they're larger, but I'm wondering how, for example, brook trout outcompete them if brook trout are not typically piscivorous, like they're eating a lot of bugs and stuff like that. If they don't have the same food source, are they competing for space or something else, or is it that they're just not piscivorous until they're larger and they're just not able to get larger if they're being surrounded by thousands of brook trout when they're all trying to eat bugs at the same time.
Nick
I mean, they go through a phase where they're not pacifist and that's largely gape limited. They'll eat anything they can fit in their mouth. But the factor with brook trout is tied to behaviors. There's a really good study done 20-something years ago looking at cutthroat trout and how they responded to behavioral cues from brook trout. Brook trout have this incredibly complex way of communicating with each other that involves false charging and flaring your fins and gills to communicate with other trout, "Hey, this is my spot. Back off." Cutthroat trout don't do any of that, but they respond to the signals. So if you try to scare a cutthroat out, like to use a modern parlance that I don't know this word at all and I should never use it again, but if you flex at a cutthroat, the cutthroat runs away. They don't flex back. Even if they're big, they just don't. And of sad because it's like a six-inch brook trout can chase out a 17 or 18-inch cutthroat from a pool. Granted, that cutthroat might turn around and eat him later, but behaviorally they just can't really compete with that sort of complexity of traits that brook trout have evolved over millennia of high-density stable systems.
Katie
So they're just kind of being disrupted. If you're constantly being chased around and scared off, even if you're not competing for the same food. It's like if you don't have time to find food or spawn because you're constantly on the run, your population's going to suffer because of it.
Nick
Yep. And not only that, you're more likely to get eaten. If you're constantly moving between pools, you're going to not be near cover as well. You're going to get picked off by a bird or something.
Katie
Now, what is the, I guess life history wouldn't be the phrase there, maybe the species history. Because I know Lahontans have gone through a, you know, they were in a larger area, as thought to be extinct and then they were rediscovered. Is that generally correct or am I off base there?
Nick
The Walker Basin Lahontan Cutthroat were thought to be extinct and there's been some other populations that have thought to be wiped out over the years and some of them have been actually. In general, they've been present in the Paleo Proto-Lahontan Basin, think of it as like the state of Nevada, for a couple million years. There's been some water exchanges from the Bonneville Basin that have introduced new genetics as recently, 600,000 years ago, but they've really been doing their own thing in these giant inland basins at points where there's a lot of water. They'll swim between watersheds or be able to swim down one river up at the next. And the real wet periods, you have one lake where every fish swims around together and they spawn in different tributary streams and then periods of drought, they end up getting sucked back into these cold headwater populations and kind of isolated. In the last 10,000 years or so, you've seen this desiccation of the Lahontan Basin. It's turned into the Nevada deserts as we know it today with populations in the streams. There's still some terminal lakes, Summit Lake, Pyramid Lake, Independence Lake where you have got natural lake occurring in the Lahontan Cutthroat Trout. Those fish get huge. But most of the numbers of populations, if not numbers of fish, are isolated in these headwater systems. morphologically they look different than lake fish. They tend to be more heavily colored, less spotted, or more spotted. The lake fish tend to, well, they're like predator. They look like a fish would look if you're cruising at the bottom of a lake, kind of pale, ambushing poor chub that had never seen it coming. From a local history out here, what we've seen in the Walker Basin is actually kind of a good example of what's happened basin-wide. In the 1870s, there were some surveyors who came out and reported seeing salmon trout running up the East Walker River in densities that were so high. I don't think they said you could walk across them, but they said the river flashed silver with these massive 20-pound fish that were leaping everywhere. And 50 years later, after a number of non-native trout introductions, the construction of a couple of dams, those fish have all gone. And you see resonant browns, resonant rainbows. And the last population of Walker Basin cutthroat trout was thought to be lost. They were written off as extinct until 1977. They were found stuck in this tiny creek in the headwaters outside of Ridgeport that was so small no one thought to put non-native fish in it. That's kind of the story of this fish throughout the basin. The death of these massive cutthroat trout runs usually corresponds with water development for irrigation because fish can't move up from the lakes into the streams when there's dams and the way we see that across the landscape. And construction of railroads because what railroads do is encourage people to put eggs on ice and move trout across the country. And so the railroad comes in, non-native trout get introduced, and those remnant populations tend to get out-competed and wink out. And it's kind of sad, really. I would have loved to have seen those fish in the 1870s swimming up the East Walker River through Bridgeport Valley with the 20-pounders flopping all over the place. It would have been pretty special.
Katie
The East Walker River is actually one of the few rivers I have fished in California, so it's nice to be able to picture what you're talking about. But yeah, I mean, we saw browns and I don't remember if we caught rainbows, but I don't think we saw a cutthroat on that trip. So I'm with you that it would have been cool to see that when it was still in its Hay Day, I guess. Were these primarily river fish then, back in the day? Now when I think of Lahontans, I think of Pyramid Lake. Were they in the lakes as well, or is that more of a recent, like when we're trying to bring them back, now that they're in these lakes?
Nick
Well, so there's kind of two different morphs of these fish, and they're genetically I'll back up for a second. There's two different morphs of these fish. There's lacustrine populations, which are lake fish, and those fish are the monsters of the cutthroat trout world. They eat other fish very quickly and they get very, very large. Those would be your equivalent of steelhead just in Nevada. They're one type. And then the other type we see are these stream populations that don't migrate and aren't tied to a lake. And those fish tend to be smaller. They are still somewhat migratory, so there's not a ton of large populations that are interconnected. We're trying to recreate one out here. But the problem with those stream stream populations is the stream segments are like 5, 10 miles long and so there's not really a good opportunity to see how much movement within the system there is, but there's a type of cutthroat trout that stays in the creek, isn't connected to a lake, and those fish tend to be smaller, they tend to be more colorful, they still get to be pretty predatory and will eat other fish if they're present, but they don't achieve that massive size that you see in the pyramid lake fish or even the summit lake fish. I mean, we just, those lacustrine fish are the iconic large cutthroat trout that really Fremont saw in the 1850s. It's really something. I mean, there's nothing else, no other way to describe them. And a lot of folks think like, "Oh, those are Lahontan cutthroat trout." But there's a ton of these smaller populations in creeks and small rivers spread throughout the range. And those fish for the size of the waters they're in get remarkably large. I mean I've caught 12 inch cutthroat trout out of a creek that was 10 inches wide.
Katie
Yeah, so that would be rare for any other kind of cutthroat or most kinds of trout in general.
Nick
Yeah, they get big no matter what the habitat is. We just don't have many large rivers where these fish are present without non-native trout to let them achieve the sizes that they probably could in rivers.
Katie
This might be kind of a dumb question. These two morphs, the lake ones that get really really big and the river ones that are relatively big but not as large, this is like a natural occurrence. This isn't like we put fish in a lake and because there was a lot of prey and space they kind of grew into their own like strain. This is something that occurred naturally?
Nick
This is something that occurred naturally. Okay. there's a lot of evidence that suggests within a basin, the fish are a lot more closely related to each other than they are with morphs in the next basin over. So the Tahoe Pyramid Truckee system, which is Lake Tahoe drains into the Truckee River, which drains into Pyramid Lake, which has those massive cutthroat trout. There's a lot of evidence that suggests that the fish in Pyramid Lake were pretty closely related to the fish in the Truckee River, who are pretty closely related to the fish in Tahoe. And the fish in the Truckee River looked like stream morphed trout. You know, they had the heavy spotting, they weren't as large. One drainage south in the Carson, there's no lake, the fish are heavily spotted, they don't get really large, they're that classic stream morphed trout. The Truckee River stream morphed trout are way, way more closely related to the fish in the lakes, even in the museum specimens, than they are to the Carson River fish, despite the fact that they look virtually identical.
Katie
Okay. Now if one of those Truckee River fish spilled out into Pyramid Lake, would it be able to join that population and breed?
Nick
Presumably. And there's been some analysis of museum specimens that would suggest that's exactly what happened. You see like a continuation of this kind of genetic profile of fish moving between the rivers and the lakes and some fish going to the lakes. Unfortunately, by the time we got the tools to really answer this question, the fish didn't exist on the landscape in that way anymore. And that's a hard one to answer using modern science. So you have to go back and look through preserved specimens and kind of infer journals and stuff like that. It's not a, we, yeah, we just don't have a good, we don't have a good answer for that. But presumably, there's no reason they wouldn't.
Katie
Are they like more closely related to any other cutthroat species versus others? Like do they have a close cousin?
Nick
They're more closely related to fish in like the Snake and Bonneville basins. So cutthroat trout in general have kind of been moving south as lineages get separated. And the number-- this is actually kind of a fun one, and I'm going to regret bringing this up, because I am not an expert in this field at all, as I have to confess up front. But the big difference between cutthroat trout across the West is the number of chromosomes that you see in the different subspecies. So even though they're all historically classified as one species, and there's been some recent taxonomic shifts and proposals that are kind of getting at this, The number of chromosomes differ. So things like Lahontan cutthroat trout have four fewer chromosomes than coastal cutthroat trout. Coastal cutthroat trout have the same number of chromosomes as rainbow trout. And then as you move kind of inland towards the west slope, you drop down by a pair. And then by the time you get into the Snake, Bonneville, and Lahontan basins, you're down two pairs. And it's just this kind of progressive loss of alleles over time. And part of that probably is just due to natural selection, and the other is just genetic drift. You see the slow elimination of these chromosomes. So the Houghton cutthroat trout kind of belong to the southern clade that presumably colonized like from the snake to the Bonneville to the interior of Nevada. And we know cutthroat have been in this basin for two million years based on fossil evidence. That said, the last genetic exchange between the Bonneville and Lahontan basins was about 600,000 years ago. You can kind of think about that and backtrace the geologic history of those drainages back to when these were isolated from the coast. The reality is cutthroat trout in the interior separated from rainbow and coastal cutthroat trout about the same time as humans separated from chimpanzees. This is a pretty deep genetic split from an evolutionary standpoint. And the separation of the Lahontan Basin from the Bonneville Basin occurred before we really see evidence for modern humans. You see morphologically modern humans, but you don't see a lot of the behavioral attributes we have at that point. So they're older than us as a species from what we can tell.
Katie
Yeah, it's kind of crazy. I never really like actively thought about it, but just thinking about something as close is like a you know as a species but as a subspecies I would have assumed that that's like a relatively recent split because they're so close does the difference in number of chromosomes between Lohans and say the coastal cutthroats or the rainbows in theory if they were to come together would they not be able to produce like a cut bow or a hybrid cutthroat or would that not be a barrier to breeding together
Nick
they can breed together
Katie
okay I wasn't sure if chromosomes were like the key factor there
Nick
It would be nice if they couldn't because it would make management a little easier.
Katie
Gotcha.
Nick
They do hybridize pretty readily. And that's like throughout a lot of these fish, that's strongly concerned because it's, if you're the only fish to colonize a new habitat and there's a bunch of similar closely related fish, the ability to reproduce with them is probably a good thing because then you can bring traits that might be adaptive. And fish genetics just work differently than mammalian genetics. There's a lot of back compatibility. It's like Windows. Windows 10 is compatible with Windows 97 or something, theoretically. I don't know for sure, I haven't tried it, but I'm told all of that stuff is back compatible.
Katie
Yeah, that's interesting. You're right, I feel like when I think of mammal hybrids, there's a handful of well-known hybrids that exist that seem like the set. Like mules exist, ligers exist, but I feel like with fish, it's kind of like, I don't know, they just mix together and form a conglomeration. Obviously, there are some exceptions, like a trout isn't going to breed with a bass, but among the cutthroats, they can all get together. Rainbows can get thrown in there. Browns and brooks can do something. Lakes and brooks can do something. It just seems a lot more malleable than a lot of other species.
Nick
Yeah, fish are weird. I mean, genetically, they're just weird. I mean, probably a classic example, back to our earlier conversation on pupfish, they haven't sniffed a sheepshead minnow for 25 million years, but they can still reproduce just fine.
Katie
Wow.
Nick
It's just nuts.
Katie
It's okay if you have no answer to this, but do you have any idea why that would be a different mechanism in fish?
Nick
No. Like I said, I'm not an expert. It just comes down to fish are different, turns out.
Katie
Out of curiosity, are you a lumper or a splitter?
Nick
You know, that's a good one. I recently worked on a study to kind of break apart some speckled dace species out here into their own distinct taxa. I think it's important, and I'm gonna answer this with a non-answer, and I'm really sorry, 'cause--
Katie
No, you're good. Go for it.
Nick
As a desert fish guy, you gotta be a bit of a splitter and say like, these fish haven't sniffed another one for half a million years, therefore they're different. But I think a lot of it comes down to what's the evolutionary history of these fish. Do you like, you know, Santa Ana speckled dace, for instance, haven't seen another species of speckled dace for three million years, which is about the time, you know, pupfish, or not pupfish, but humans split from chimpanzees. Like that's a good, that's a good thing. Those fish are probably different. They probably shouldn't be called subspecies number 10. Cutthroat trout, Lahontan cutthroat trout, haven't seen a coastal cutthroat trout in a similar amount of time. To lump them in the same species seems dubious. The problem is, as humans, we want to put labels on things. And that's the whole hierarchy of science is we've got Linnaean classification, but it's really a continuous spectrum. Like we're not talking about, okay, well there are 20 nucleotides different at this, you know, on this chromosome or this allele's got five differences, therefore it's a species or therefore it's a subspecies. I think there's like 36 or 37 different species concepts that have been proposed or published in science. And so you kind of just have to pick, either pick one or pick none and say, realistically everything needs to be taken, everything needs to be taken into perspective. From a conservation standpoint, I tend to favor saving things rather than lumping them. So the differences between Lahontans in the Walker Basin and say Tahoe Truckee are pretty substantial. There's like discernible genetic differences in terms of allele frequencies. I would say probably don't mix those fish unless we have a real good reason to. There's a quote by Aldo Leopold that I've seen published and misquoted several times, so I'm gonna do the same. And he was a early conservationist at the University of California, Berkeley. Boiled down to like the first rule of intelligent tinkering is to not throw away all the parts. We don't know what benefits these different species might have or the local adaptations that might be there. So from a management standpoint, I do try to keep things, I'm a splitter at least by default there. To walk it back to an answer like yes, by default I think if something's evolved on its own and kind of been doing its own thing for a while, that's probably separate. But if it's something that we've split up in our brief history in North America, we might want to think about mixing those populations back together.
Katie
Yeah, and I think I understand what you're getting at. I mean, maybe a simple way for me to explain what I took from that is if a fish has evolved to serve a specific function in its isolated area. You know, if we were to lump it with everything else, then if that population went away, in the grand scheme of the population of that species overall, it wouldn't seem like a big deal. Like, oh, if rainbows aren't in that stream anymore, you know, who cares? We've got rainbows everywhere. But if we're considering them their own thing that maybe serve a specific function in that particular river system, then suddenly it is a big deal if they're not there. So I guess it maybe gives perspective on, you know, when things disappear, how big of a deal is it? I'm a splitter because that's just more species I can catch when I go out. I like to keep track of all the species I've caught. So if I lump them all together, then that's just fewer things that I've got on my horizon. So I'm with you on splitting for a different reason.
Nick
No, I mean, it's really cool to see these fish in the areas that they're native to. I mean, hiking into the high sierras to catch a golden trout or a cutthroat trout, it's such a cool experience.
Katie
Yeah, this is a good time to transition maybe if people are pounding their desk, like I don't care about all this fish nerd stuff, I just want to hear about catching them. Tell me a little bit about fishing for Lahontans, assuming that you still, you know, do some fishing. I know we've been talking about science, but I have to assume that's still in you somewhere.
Nick
Oh yeah, I mean, I fish quite a bit. I think I was actually fishing two days ago. I broke off a really nice brown trout. I'm still kicking myself for that. No, I'm a, I love fishing. And so that's, that's kind of where I come into this from. And so I apologize for all the fishing talk.
Katie
Oh no, I like it. But for those pounding their desks wanting one of the fishing details, I mean you're welcome to talk about things like Pyramid Lake because that's what people are going to think about, but I'm also open to hearing about the populations that you've talked about that maybe aren't as well known, the stream populations that aren't getting the millions of YouTube views just because they're massive. So I'll let you kind of tell me what is worth knowing about fishing for the Huns.
Nick
I mean it boils down to their biology. Like they are a super predator in their own world and a lot of the folks at Pyramid Lake will do the indicator kind of deep water midging techniques or pulling a streamer or something, but those fish are really chasing to each other. And the more effective ways to get them are to get them when they're eating the small morsel on the way by because you're fishing at the same time. But those fish are targeting prey, like big prey. Cutthroat trout get big by eating big things. And that is true whether you're fishing in a stream or fishing in a lake, if you find the big prey sources, you're going to find the cutthroat trout. And so we've got fisheries like Pyramid Lake where those fish are just turbocharged by that ecosystem and they eat prey that are several pounds. And there's the fly fishing folks who sit on the shore and can catch them on streamers or fish in mi-chironomid patterns. That's a blast. I've done it. out on the water trolling like you would for salmon or fishing for them the same way you would chinook and they catch 20 to 30 pound or not quite 30 but they'll get 20 pound fish doing that. The real thing for cutthroat it's you got to keep in mind they're after the bigger fish and so when we have them out here even lakes not pyramid they're going to be chasing bait fish or stocked rainbow trout if they're present in the system. And so the way I approach fishing a lake is to think about it from a science standpoint of like where is the bait going to be. If there's a big wind blowing, you tend to get things like phytoplankton and zooplankton piling up on the downwind side. The baitfish come in, start eating that. The cutthroat trout follow. And so from a kind of two-dimensional where on the lake do you go, you go to where the food is. And then the other thing to think about there is the three-dimensional space. If it's really hot and the water temperature is 90, like yeah, these fish are pretty tough, they're gonna be down in the thermocline. They're a desert trout, they know how to avoid the heat, so they're gonna be kind of in that optimal 60 to 70 degree water. And if you're fishing for them in a creek, I mean we've got places like Wolf Creek off Sonora Pass and the 108 where you can, excuse me, go up and with a fly rod, a little three or four weight, catch 50 or 60 cutthroat trout in an afternoon. On a dry fly, they'll be 12 to 14 inches and they just, they go crazy there too and it comes down to the biggest food that's available. Cutthroat trout are... it's gonna sound really dumb... they're remarkably naive. They do not learn. I literally have seen people hook a cutthroat trout, break it off, put the exact same fly on that they just lost, put it back in, catch that fish, and get both flies back. There's some trout that have evolved with humans for a long time like browns. You're never... you're rarely gonna catch a brown trout on the same thing twice. They're pretty good at figuring out like, "Oh, that minnow wasn't real." Cutthroat trout tend to just strike the largest prey available that seems reasonable. So if you're fishing a creek for them and there's hoppers kicking around, I don't really bother looking to see if there's caddisflies. You throw on an hopper pattern. If you see big October caddis coming up, that's what you fish. You look at the biggest possible prey item that those fish have, at least in a creek, and you go for it.
Katie
So sounds like the creek fishing is not terribly dissimilar from fishing for any other trout in a creek like same kind of weight rod Same techniques like it could be anything from dry fly to streamer Which you know what I feel like applied to To most species of trout like they could go for anything from a dry fly to a streamer depending on what they're eating at that Time and how big they are But the lake fish sound like they're a little bit more unique and I think you may be touched on this But you did say that they're they're typically going for like the bigger prey but I know a popular way to catch them is on like a midget or an indicator is that just kind of a I'm Cruising along and there's something right in front of my face So I'm I'm gonna go ahead and open my mouth and let it go in there Like is that why you're catching them on midges?
Nick
Yep. Okay. I mean cutthroat trout I'm gonna just kind of The nerd side of me wants to bring in like optimal foraging theory or something in turn like, you know this is just a cost, it comes down to cost-benefit analysis of is it worth it to eat the little thing as I cruise by and that's what they're doing when they're catching them on midges. Sometimes the density of midges coming up will be enough where it's worth it for a 10 pound trout to go open its mouth and eat only midges, but that trout needs to eat a lot of midges to make it worth its time. Most of the time those fish are there because the fish they're eating are eating midges. And so you'll catch them on the midge bites because it's there, it's convenient and their prey is their eating midges.
Katie
Gotcha. So they're already in the area because their prey is there, but if there's one right in front of its face and it's already swimming past, it's like, "Eh, I can go ahead and take this." I'm near a fish pyramid lake. What is a typical day or couple days like at pyramid? Are you catching multiple fish? Is it like a one fish a day if you're lucky kind of place? I've heard kind of mixed things on how people have done there. We don't need to focus too much on Pyramid Lake, but I am curious about, like, what can one expect if you go there?
Nick
I mean, it's such a, it depends so much on the day. Like, there's some days where you can go and reasonably expect to catch over 10 trout. You know, the smallest one might be 24 inches. Those are pretty special days. Most of the time, it's a couple of fish a day. you're kind of out early trying to get the morning bite before the wind picks up too much. The best days I've had out there have been the worst weather days of my life. So it's one of those like I mentioned earlier the wind can kind of pile up forage and if you can hit that right on pyramid it can be good. The flip side of pyramid is like sometimes when that happens you you have four-foot waves you know it's like fishing in an ocean and you can't actually get out. That sort of fishery is highly seasonal. The best time is like this is April, so the best time is right about now, a little before now. By the time May rolls around, the fish are starting to kind of get pushed down by the temperatures into the offshore fisheries. And trollers and boaters can still pick them up. But from a fly fishing standpoint, it's not. Your best time to go is kind of spring and sometimes fall if you can catch them on those early ones.
Katie
Gotcha.
Nick
Personally, I mean, this is me being, this is my personal preference. The midging is probably the best way to catch fish there from just an effectiveness standpoint. You throw out your indicator and you sit there and you know, when it goes down, you got a fish. It works, it works well. Personally, like I've always been partial to the tug is the drug sort of streamer fishing of like, I've got a couple of fish out there on the streamer and those are the memorable ones where you just feel your line reverse course and you're like, "I thought it was coming in and holy, something just happened." And that might be my personal thing. The other thing I have to caveat is Pyramid Lake's not managed by me or my district. That's all run by the Paiute tribe there. They've got permits set up so people can access the lake through them. kind of a unique situation where it's tribally controlled and managed and the fisheries is kind of in partnership.
Katie
Gotcha. Now what just as kind of a final thought here if you were to get them gonna come out as a as a visitor to your area and target Lahontans you could use Pyramid Lake you could choose some tributaries nearby like what what is your opinion of the best like Lahontan experience if someone wants to come out and just like get a feel for this species and experience what it has to offer what would you what would you choose?
Nick
Gosh, that's a good one. There's kind of three things that I'm gonna, oh man, I'm not gonna make a choice here because there's just...
Katie
You can highlight, you can highlight like two or three different ones and give the pros and cons of each if you want.
Nick
So Pyramid Lake, you got it, you have to do Pyramid because like it's nice to go to a place where a small trout is five pounds. Like short of going after taimen in Mongolia, you're not gonna find a bigger trout. Short of fishing, for steelhead. It's really a special experience to just be able to go out and be like, "Yeah, this was a 10-pound fish. It was good. It was nice. Just put it over." Anywhere else a 10-pound trout, you're like, "I'm done. That was a great fish."
Katie
Yeah, fish of my life.
Nick
The flip side would be catching a bigger fish in a smaller creek. It would be interesting and kind of fun to catch an 18 to 20-inch wild trout on a dry fly in a river in the high country or a creek in high country. That's always pretty cool and those fish are just so vibrantly colored and special that it's like catching a golden trout just kind of bigger and a little more aggressive. That's hard to beat. I mean, that's a unique special experience and we manage a fishery right now called Slinkered Creek that's walk-in only and that is a place where you can catch 15, 16-inch cutthroat trout that are just bright red and purple, unlike anything else. I'll send you one of the pictures of them because it's just impossible to believe that they're real fish. And then the third thing that I would suggest doing is finding a reservoir where we manage a recreational lawn cutthroat trout fishery and fishing the spawning run. We've got a number of lakes out here where you have tributaries open to fishing above a non-native cutthroat trout population. Crowley Lake is one of the fisheries where this happens and you have five to ten pound cutthroat trout swimming up some tiny little creek like Coho Salmon in Alaska. It's just nuts catching these big old trout on a four-weight or five-weight rod and you're fishing a 20-foot wide tributary stream and you hook into a five-pound fish that just takes you into your back and go into Texas. That's a fun experience too. Those would probably be the three that I would say. Choose your own adventure.
Katie
Yeah, yeah, it sounds like a high country salmon. I feel like that needs to be a new state marketing tactic.
Nick
Yeah, actually, that would be a good... Ecologically, they're probably closer to salmon than any other inland trout we have. I mean, Chinook salmon are super predators in the ocean. These guys evolved to do the same thing with these inland seas.
Katie
Awesome. Well, Nick, is there anything you want to wrap up with? Any parting thoughts you'd want to give on Lahontan or any resources you'd want to point people to, either your personal resources or state of California stuff? anything you want?
Nick
Yeah, I mean the state of California has a heritage trout program where we promote waters that have native cutthroat trout populations that are open to fishing and managed for them. I would refer anyone to the heritage trout website to see a list of designated cutthroat trout waters. There's also Walker or Lahontan Cutthroat Recovery.org which is managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service in partnership with DFW and NDAL where you can track and see restoration in real time. And that's a really cool one. And we're working through, in partnership with the USGS out of Bozeman, Montana, to kind of do a geo a map of all the different cutthroat trout restoration projects and efforts that have gone on in the last 20 or 30 years. And that's just, that would be cool to check out for any real hardcore trout enthusiasts. You want to see how they're doing on the landscape, you know, check out that online one and that's also on the.org Cut Their Trout website. That would be the resources I would send. Always feel free to call me if you want to fish the area because I'm always, I won't come with you but I'll give you as much information as I can.
Katie
Well, careful giving out, I mean, not that I have the biggest listenership but giving out free resources. I feel like people are going to take you up on it.
Nick
There's some places that aren't. If you figure them out on your own I'll confirm it and ask you not to talk about it but I'll point you in the right direction.
Katie
There you go. I'm familiar with those kinds of places. Well, Nick, this is a lot of fun. I appreciate you taking the time for this. I'll have you hang around for just a minute or two after we wrap up here, but just thank you again for joining me today.
Nick
Oh, no problem. Thanks for having me. Good to talk fish.
Katie
All right, that's a wrap. Thank you all for listening. If you want to find all the other episodes as well as show notes, you can find those on fishuntamed.com. You'll also find the contact link there if you want to reach out to me. And you can also find me on Instagram @fishuntamed. If you want to support the show, you can give it a follow on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcasting app. And if you'd like to leave a review, it would be greatly appreciated. But otherwise, thank you all again for listening. I'll be back here in two weeks with another episode. Take care, everybody.
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