Interesting

[Muleball39]

So I was able to fish the 2 islands this weekend above Patrick, so here is my question how small were some of the browns that were released? The reason I ask is I caught a brown this weekend that was 5" long and looked like a stream bred trout to me.

[Brian Wise]

MDC stocks 2 year old browns Muleball.

Brian

[ozark trout fisher]

MDC stocks 2 year old browns Muleball.

Brian

Some of our streams definitely are supported by natural reproduction. Just an example, some folks think most of the trout in the wild trout section of the Little Piney are stockies from the White Ribbon area, but I have honestly caught more 3 to 7 inchers than anything else, so I think that kinda disproves that theory.

I know that that is a little off topic, but wild rainbows definitely do spawn enough to keep up populations in Missouri. I believe the 1% survival statistic means that only 1 percent of the eggs of a given fish survive NOT that only 1/100th of the trout spawn successfully. Considering how many eggs a trout lays each spawn, that should explain how this works.

At least thats my take on this.

[dgames]

I am definitely of the opinion that NFOW rainbows are virtually all wild. The point of my earlier post on this topic was that the NFOW is chock full of rainbows and the MDNR isn't stocking them, so they pretty much have to be wild.

Since the early 90's, I have probably spent 20-30 days on the NFOW and over that time, I probably have caught 9 raindows for every brown and that is for the entire length from Kelly Ford/Rainbow Spring down to the last riffle above Dawt. I will say that the last time I fished the river was 2006, so there may be a higher proportion of browns now, but that was my experience when I was fishing it a lot.