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
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