[instrumental piano music]
Bruce Leutscher: We’re at Pictured Rocks
National Lakeshore
along the banks of the Hurricane River.
It’s small in comparison to what you normally think
of a magnificent trout stream,
but it has great habitat.
And coaster brook trout were the native fish species
found in this stream but were extirpated
from the area about the 1900s.
[water flowing]
Bruce Leutscher: And the Park Service,
along with the Fish and Wildlife Service
in the state of Michigan,
has been trying to do a reintroduction plan
to get a population reestablished.
Collaboration with our partners is key
to pulling off any type of project like this,
such as Dr. Jill Leonard
from Northern Michigan University
that has helped with pretty extensive projects,
looking at the impact
of introduced non-native salmonid species into the system
and finding out how the fish are doing
and if our efforts are successful or not.
[water flowing]
Jill Leonard, PhD: And so one of the things
that we’ve really been focusing on
is how these native coaster brook trout
and brook trout in general have to interact
with non-native species.
So I think everybody’s familiar with the whole issues
associated with invasive species,
especially here in the Great Lakes.
[water flowing]
But one of the things they don’t often think about
is that we have non-native species
we don’t call “invasive.”
We call them “fun to fish for.”
And so those include things like coho salmon
and steelhead trout, brown trout.
They were not native to this region,
and so once they’ve been introduced,
they now interact with the native species.
Now, we’re interested in trying to help
those brook trout do well
and specifically the coaster brook trout.
And yet now we have new players in the system,
and we really need to understand how that may have an impact
in our success rate.
[water flowing]
Jill Leonard, PhD: Much of what we do is electroshocking,
and so that entails going into the streams
and to temporarily stun the fish.
Then we will try to get information on them.
So we’ll identify them.
We’ll measure their length, measure their weight.
[indistinct chatter]
So we’ve actually been working on coaster brook trout
and brook trout here in Pictured Rocks
for about 11 years.
And over that time, we know that the non-native species
are having an impact on coaster brook trout,
and that it may have an influence on the number
of coasters that we see in the streams.
And so one of the things that the park
is really thinking about is, well,
now we know this is an issue.
Is there anything that we can do
that’s still going to encourage the coasters
and help them out when we know that it doesn’t make sense
to remove these non-native species?
So what’s the status of coaster brook trout
here in Pictured Rocks?
When we started the project, we thought they were gone.
And then as we got more into it— we started doing telemetry
on some of the native brook trout
that were present in the streams.
We realized that there were coasters after all.
And so there is interest in increasing those numbers,
but the trick to it is to find out what’s going to do that.
Is there a way that we can make these streams more habitable,
more appealing,
that are going to produce more coaster brook trout?
Bruce Leutscher: Dr. Leonard's research gives us the answers
that we need to move forward
with the management of this species.
I think that one of the biggest successes
of the project has so far shown
that we have a resident population,
a natural population of coaster brook trout.
[tapping keys]
Bruce Leutscher: So the resulting data
that we get on habitat requirements
for this specific species of fish
could help us direct some of our management in how we
protect our streams.
Jill Leonard, PhD: To me, the lesson is to really pay
a lot of attention,
to be very careful about what your activities may do,
because it’s really, really hard to undo a non-native species.
[instrumental piano music]