Tag Archives: Yellowstone National Park

Cutting Deep – Commercial Fishermen killing one trout to save another in Yellowstone National Park

“Everything in Yellowstone National Park is a controversy,” says Dan Wenk, Yellowstone National Park superintendent. “And I’m glad it is because it means people care.” One of the things they care about is what’s going on in Yellowstone Lake. That’s where a commercial fishing crew from the Great Lakes region is catching lake trout with up to 40 miles of netting. This is the epicenter of the angry visitor’s angst. Lake trout are not native to the park. An angler caught the first one in 1994. By mid 2000s, lake trout had eaten 90 to 95 percent of the native Yellowstone cutthroat trout in the lake. Commercial gillnetting to kill lake trout went gangbusters in 2009. “The problem is lake trout are like large wolves on the landscape, only in the lake,” Koel says. “Large, highly predatory, fish-eating machines essentially.” Click here to read the story 12:01

Commercial Fishing in Yellowstone National Park – Killing one fish to save another

White-breasted gulls are following a slow-moving boat in Yellowstone Lake. The crew on board is up to something fishy. It’s four fishermen letting out an awful lot of net. The net sinks into the lake’s deep depths in a large S-curve created by the swerve of the captain’s turns. The crew manages up to 40 miles of netting. That netting collects 300,000 lake trout every summer.  “We are aggressively netting non-native lake trout in Yellowstone Lake to reduce their predation on our native cutthroat,” says Todd Koel, Yellowstone National Park native fish conservation leader. An angler turned in an unusual catch in 1994. It was a fish that wasn’t supposed to be in Yellowstone Lake — a lake trout. The surprise catch hooked biologists with an unexpected problem. They had an invader in a fishery carefully monitored for the persistence of the park’s coveted native fish, Yellowstone cutthroat trout. Read the story here 13:33