User:ChrisGriswold/sandbox

The birth of a wild trout is an incredible climax to a long, complicated chain of events. Knowing these events makes the capture of a wild trout so much more meaningful and reminds me why such a ﬁsh is precious.

A wild trout, by my deﬁnition, has been naturally reproduced by the physical pairing of trout that have naturally reproduced in the wild for several generations. The life of a wild trout begins when prospective parents become mature and laden with eggs or sperm. This ﬁrst occurs when the male is two or three years old and the female is three or four. The variation in sexual maturity helps ensure that the parents' genes will not be identical. It is also one of nature’s ways of neutralizing weak, recessive genes.

Each family of wild trout has a speciﬁc seasonal spawning time. For the most part, in the northern latitudes, brown trout and brook trout are fall and early winter spawners. Trout native to the western slopes of the Rockies. such as rainbow, cutthroat, golden, and Apache, are late-winter to spring spawners.

About two weeks to a month before spawning, adults gather and stage an upstream movement toward the area where they themselves were born. Some trout pair during this staging while others pair later, near or at the nesting site. The movement to the spawning gravels may be as short a distance as a few hundred yards to many hundreds of miles. It’s been established that approximately 70 to 80 percent of wild adults ﬁnd precisely the area where their parents made the redd (nest) and deposited them as eggs. The remainder go elsewhere, not because they're lost, but, I believe, because they're programmed by nature to ensure genetic diversity and species distribution.

When the adult pair reaches the spawning area, which is usually in the shallow gravel area at the tail of a pool, they look for a signiﬁcant concentration of gravel the size of a marble to that of a walnut. The female makes a trial dig with her tail to test her ability to dig and, even more signiﬁcantly, to ensure that there is good percolation of water through the gravel. If there isn’t, the eggs she deposits there have a very poor chance of incubation. Eggs need a steady ﬂow of constant temperature and oxygen-enriched water to resist fungal attack and freezing.