Southern Appalachian Brook Trout Trip

[Mike Tolbert]

Here’s a video of yesterday’s Fly Fishing trip in North Georgia with Zach. We were fishing for Southern Appalachian Brook Trout; native since the last Ice Age. It started off as a beautiful day but we got stuck in a T-Storm and I managed to get struck by lightening via a big granite rock. It wasn’t bad, but I definitely felt it. On the bright side…. Lightening never strikes twice, right?

[Brian Greer]

Cool video.

I make it to the Smokys once a year to do some small stream fishing for brookies.
I’ll fish the larger waters for a day or two, but I really like the small streams at higher elevations where you can find the little natives.

Getting shocked from lightning through a rock is pretty scary. Granite is really a pretty good insulator compared to most things. Water will improve the conductivity of most things. If you only felt it, you were pretty darn lucky, it easily could have been much, much worse. Lightning is a huge power source. Tons of voltage with tons of current.

It takes a lot of voltage to drive through granite. I have quite a bit of experience with voltage testing. I test insulation values on electric utility equipment all of the time. There’s not much defense against lightning, basically all you can do is improve your chances by being in a lower risk spot.

But enough of that, are the brook trout you were catching the same species or sub-species of those found in the Smokys? Or does each isolated region have their own sub-species?

Brian

[Zach Matthews]

We were totally soaked, everything around us was soaked, the ground was soaked, and we were standing knee deep in water. I didn’t feel it although the lightning strike so close certainly got my attention. But Mike was leaning over on a rock in contact with the bank/hill which the lightning actually struck. I’m sure we did get super lucky.

Those Georgia brookies are native Southern strain brook trout. They were never stocked here, which is how I know they are native. In the Smokies however they actually were restocked by some brookies from northern zones. The result is that most brookies in the Smokies are technically hybrids, but it takes a trained biologist to tell them apart from each other anyway. It’s a very very subtle difference; this isn’t a subspecies that has separated all that much. Ironically it is today’s northern fish that would have derived from our southern stock and not vice versa, because the northerly zones had to be recolonized after glaciation ended ~13,000 years ago.

Here’s a study on brown trout recolonization of Europe after glaciation; it would have worked the same way here. http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v82/n1/full/6884470a.html

The brook trout obviously evolved in a northerly, cold temperate climate, such as we have now in the northern U.S. and southern Canada. That is where the fish do the best today–in Labrador these fish get up to the 40 lb class. But what constitutes a “northern” climate has moved around a lot over the last million years or so. Whether the *first* brookies originated here in the Southern Appalachians during a cold phase (when this area was like Labrador) or whether they originated in a northerly area during a temperate period like we are in today, then migrated as climate shifted, I am not sure anyone knows. That would be a fossil record question. But certainly the fish have spanned up and down the Appalachian range for several hundred thousand and probably a few million years, going wherever they could go as climate gradually opened up a window here or there for them to live. Today’s Georgia brookies are on the very southern edge of the available habitat, and will probably be gone within a few hundred years.

Zach

[Alan Corbin]

Great report and video.
Although the native brookies are scarce in local streams in central Mass they are around. In fact there are still a few rivers along the coast with “salters” in them. Usually I am chasing stripers, blues or albies and have yet to try for the sea going brookies.
I have hooked a few brookie fingerlings with parr marks in a local landlocked salmon fishery in the fall, so they are still reproducing here.

[David Anderson]

“You do want to do this, right?”
“Spider pig”
LOL

Cool video Mike & Zach.

www.dsaphoto.com

A picture is thousand words that takes less than a second while a thousand words is a picture that takes a month.

[Zach Matthews]

That’s amazing Alan. I actually looked up coastal brookies after you posted – had NO idea those still existed in the lower 48.

[Author]

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