Bringing Bonneville Cutthroat Trout Back to Silver Creek, Nevada

Bonneville cutthroat trout are relics of ancient Lake Bonneville. At its fullest, about 15,000 years ago, the lake's shore lay only a few miles from the eastern slopes of the Snake Range. As the lake shrank, the trout survived by retreating into the year-round streams that fed it, and they lived on in those mountain streams for thousands of years — until settlers stocked them with non-native brook, brown and rainbow trout. The newcomers quickly outcompeted most of the Snake Range's cutthroat populations and interbred with them.

Restoring the North Snake Range

In the early 1990s the Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW) began an ambitious restoration programme on Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service land in the North Snake Range. It removed every non-native trout and reintroduced Bonneville cutthroat to Smith, Deadman, Deep Canyon, Hampton and Hendry's Creeks. That left Silver Creek as the only stream in the North Snake Range, within the fish's native range, not yet restored — and NDOW, with some help from Great Basin National Park, set about changing that.

Clearing Silver Creek

• 2012: NDOW built a rock gabion barrier on Silver Creek so that non-native fish downstream could not swim up into the future restoration area.
• August 2013: park staff helped NDOW carry out its carefully planned chemical treatment of the Silver Creek drainage. Over four days, 30 drip stations, several spraying crews and a johnboat removed every non-native fish from the creek and its reservoir. Soon afterwards, sterile tiger trout were stocked in the reservoir to give anglers something to fish until the cutthroat were established.
• The following summer: park staff helped NDOW check the result. Over several weeks, crews of three or four electrofished Silver Creek and all its tributaries and confirmed that, apart from the tiger trout, no fish were left alive.

Bringing the natives home

With the treatment confirmed, the plan for June 2015 was for NDOW and the park's resource management staff to collect as many cutthroat trout as possible from Snake Creek, carry them in insulated, aerated tanks supplied with oxygen to the Silver Creek drainage, and release them at chosen spots. The new population is to be watched closely for several years to make sure it grows well, and topped up with fish from other North Snake Range streams if needed. Within a few years, cutthroat trout should be spread throughout the drainage — another conservation population, and a productive native fishery for the public.

Over the previous decade the park and NDOW had built a strong partnership around a shared goal: restoring Bonneville cutthroat trout throughout their native range and protecting them for future generations.

Sources

• Jonathan Reynolds, biological science technician, "Park Partners with NDOW to Restore Native Fish," The Midden (Great Basin National Park), vol. 15, no. 1, summer 2015, National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/park-partners-with-ndow-to-restore-native-fish.htm