Sowbug Roundup 2024

[tjm]

Spent Friday there and saw no sowbugs at the sowbug. There were dozens of excellent fly tyers, even if the main theme seemed saltwater oriented. 

The Crane Creek trout are real trout but not defiantly unrelated to steelhead, interesting seminar though. 

[jdmidwest]

7 hours ago, tjm said:

Spent Friday there and saw no sowbugs at the sowbug. There were dozens of excellent fly tyers, even if the main theme seemed saltwater oriented. 

The Crane Creek trout are real trout but not defiantly unrelated to steelhead, interesting seminar though. 

Sowbugs were for the shufflers down there.  They have shifted directions.

Wanted to go, family changed my plans.  Is usually a good time with good people.

Steelheads need some access to ocean saltwater for some time to become steelheads.  They are ocean run trout.

 

[tjm]

9 hours ago, jdmidwest said:

Steelheads need some access to ocean saltwater for some time to become steelheads.  They are ocean run trout.

 

True, but DNA analysis show some signs that differentiate potential steelhead from potential resident trout within the same population, I don't pretend to know much about all that.   The genetic study that started as the DNA research on the Mo. wild trout a few years ago, when completed shows numerous similarities to other groups of trout and many dissimilarities as well, I won't attempt to explain, nor could I, but Crane and Mill creeks have unique (and dissimilar) markers, one of which in the instance of Crane is more similar to the Sacramento River Coastal trout, an "inversion" found in the anadromous  members more often than in resident members of that Sacramento group,  than other groups of Mo. trout have, including the hatchery trout.  I paid more attention to the Crane fish than to the other samples, and, it should be noted that samples taken below the blue ribbon area showed more similarity to hatchery fish, presumably because of stocking in Spring Creek.

As I understand it the Mo. fish are not as closely related to the upper McCloud redband as they are to the McCloud coastal trout, but they have been isolated long enough that there has been some genetic drift making them unique to upper Crane, and that there have been some mixing with Mo. hatchery strains (records show some stocking there periodically up until the 1960s). You'd have to examine his charts and graphs to get a real picture of the many similarities and dissimilarities between the several groups of fish compared. Baird Station on the McCloud used numerous strains of trout and mixed them randomly and most of the stocked  trout all over the world had origins in the Sacramento/McCloud/Pit Rivers. So, no surprise that our trout have that DNA, nor that it would be mixed rather than pure McCloud redband.  

Early Mo. stockings would likely have been from Mo. Fish Commision's Brown Spring Hatchery (built 1879, ended 1916) near St. Joseph, from embryos sourced  from Baird.  The Neosho Federal Hatchery was established  in 1888 so after that time fish could have been supplied from there.n (I also remember that in the 1950s (and earlier?)  every spring that had a stream of water as big as your hand had people trying to establish commercial "trout farms" and that many of those trout escaped and/or were released over time, I've caught trout in several streams that should not have them)

I do hope that the study will be published, I'd like to have time to read and examine his findings and conclusions more closely. I think it merely confirms what I already believed from reading the various records.