Brook Trout population before things were destroyed.

[pcray1231]

TB, I can't say that I've EVER seen transparent pectoral, pelvic, or anal fins on brook trout. After seeing your post I went back and looked through a bunch of pictures of more typical 4-8" brookies, and same deal. No, none are transparent. None of them. I then went to google images and googled "wild brook trout", and again, no transparent pectoral, pelvic, or anal fins.

Browns and bows, yes. Not brookies. Though many of the tail (caudal) fins are semi-transparent.

There are varying degrees of red/orange/gray/black on the fins of different fish. It's by no means universal, but as a general rule of thumb, the wild ones show a lot more orange/red while the stockies show a lot more darker black/gray, even yellowish green if they look to be "attempting" some color.

From what I see, the white/black on the anal fin is, again, not universal, but about the most reliable indicator. Stockies generally have the white and black muddled together somewhat, or at least, it's not a straight line separating them, whereas the wild ones have a sharp straight line separating the white from the black.

In this thread, the only one that trips me up is Fishidiot's pic in post #58. It has that non-clear distinction between white and black on the anal fin. The black is bleeding into the white. Typical of a stockie, although, by no means as bad as I've seen. I find it quite possible this is a stockie that's been in the stream a long time, and hence starved out. But I'm certainly not sure of it.

 

[salmonoid]

This is not definitive, for sure, but it was written in 1893 (and probably formulated 10 or more years earlier, as similar descriptions show up in earlier reports of the State Commissioners of Fisheries). So this provides one glimpse of the situation before everything was completely logged and brown trout had become ubiquitious, although certainly not one of pre-European settler times.

From Fishes of Pennsylvania, by Tarleton Bean:

Size. -- The average brook trout seldom exceed seven or eight inches in length, and smaller individuals are much more abundant and require legal protection. In the northeastern part of its habitat the brook trout grows much larger, specimens weighing from three to six pounds being not uncommon, and in one of the Rangeley lakes an individual weighing eleven pounds is recorded; while Seth Green took a twelve-pound specimen in the Sault St. Marie, and Hallock mentions one which was said to weigh seventeen pounds.

As an interesting aside, the obituary of Dr. Bean notes that he died from a pulmonary embolism, the end result of a two-month illness that was triggered by being struck by a car, as he was crossing the street. It also mentions he was a graduate of the State Normal School of Millersville, PA.

My take is that we tend to hold a falsely nostalgic view of historical fish sizes. The trout population (biomass) before things were "destroyed" was undoubtedly much, much larger than it is today, a function primarily of there being a much, much greater habitat available and the presence of many more smaller fish. But the notion of there being large quantities of larger brookies swimming around our small mountain freestoners is a mythical one. And the notion that every stream in Pennsylvania was a coldwater stream before logging is also false. By the end of the 19th century, the natural fisheries that existed had many new species introduced, as well as stocked counterparts, as brookies were the predominant salmonid that was stocked.

We may actually be at a place where the average size of wild brookies today is about the same as in the past, but the population of larger than average fish is slightly above where they were 100 or 200 years ago. Mike has noted on a number of occasions that one way to grow larger fish in a stream is to reduce the number of fish in the stream. Less small fish competing for food allows the fish that remain to grow larger. In effect, we have done that, using the ecological damage caused by logging, coal mining, and global warming to reduce the rate that brookies may have proliferated at in the past, but giving the fish that do survive a better chance of not being eaten by something else.

I've been logging trout on an app on my phone since 2012, so I have four years of data that lends itself to easy analysis. About 1.3% of the brookies that I caught were 12" or larger. About half of those were stockers or fish of indeterminate origins, but the other six were clearly wild fish. Since my photos are separate from the app data, I've had to go back and locate the actual fish pictures, but the four I've located so far came from the same drainage - two on one June day in 2012, another from 2013 and another from 2014. I ran the photos through a piece of software that estimates length based on a known calibrated length (I used the tip of my pointer finger to wrist) and they come back 12-13.5", which matches with my recorded lengths.

 

[Cornholio]

I think Salmonoid and Fishidiot gave a pretty good description of how things would have been. Lots of small mountain streams with small fish, pretty much like what we see today. The only difference being that there would have been a lot more streams.

As far as bigger fish I think it is fair to say that north central and more than likely the Cumberland Valley would have had some much bigger fish.

 

[pcray1231]

At least forested in regions of NC and central PA, I don't think there would have been "more" streams. i.e. basically every small or medium sized stream already holds wild trout. Hard to improve much on near 100%.

That probably would have held true over a wider area, for instance much of the coal mining regions of western and eastern PA. And it would have held true in farming regions, too, where they would have originally been forested.

And of course, what we think of as "brown trout streams" would have been brookies. In general, these are typically larger and more fertile, and yes, would have held bigger brook trout than what is typical today. Big Spring is a remnant of this situation, but that same thing would have occurred in Spring Creek, Penns Creek, the LJR, etc. So it's not that the small streams would have held bigger brookies than they do today, it's that brookies wouldn't be, as a general rule, confined to the small headwater streams like they are today. As has been pointed out in this thread, take a brookie out of the infertile headwater streams and they get bigger. It's just the exception rather than the rule today. It wouldn't have been then.

And in terms of freestoners, larger typically means warmer. That woulda been true then too, but the stream size cutoff where it gets too warm for trout would have been much larger, given that a conifer based forest would soak up far more water, leading to less runoff, and instead far more consistent flows year round, and far more groundwater input in the summertime. Further, entire stream lengths would have been forested and thus shaded, instead of flowing through cleared lands and thus exposed to the sun once they hit the valleys.

 

[5footfenwick]

I thought I’d try and revive this topic a little. Anyone have any big brookie photos from the last 8 years to add?

 

[5footfenwick]

 

[5footfenwick]

 

[5footfenwick]

 

[wildtrout2]

Beautiful photos!

 

[JeffP]

Beautiful fish! Are the second and third the same fish? Interesting net! It was interesting looking back over this thread. I have to wonder about names we haven't heard from for a while.

 

[wildtrout2]

Beautiful fish! Are the second and third the same fish? Interesting net! It was interesting looking back over this thread. I have to wonder about names we haven't heard from for a while.

That net is quite unique. I was also wondering about some of those past members as well.

 

[5footfenwick]

Hey Jeff P. They are different fish. Second fish is a 12-1/2” , Third fish is 13-1/2”. Admittedly that is a very small net just for brook trout fishing. I know what you mean about the names we haven’t heard from in a while. It seems we lost a few people. Or maybe they are still lurking without posting ?

 

[wildtrout2]

A couple of my better natives. Both 11" fish. My best to date was in 2010 @13.5", which I don't have a pic of unfortunately.

 

[Mike]

In SE PA there are still places where brookies get larger than 6 to 8 inches. In fact there is more water that holds brookies over 10 inches in SE PA then any other place I fish.
Before the stocking of browns just about everywhere, all the limestone streams had brook trout populations. And the brookies grew big in the limestone streams.

Contributing to the generalized length discrepancy of ST in SE Pa vs the rest of the state is the ST growth rates in SE Pa, which are greater than those in northcentral Pa freestoners as an example. I became especially aware of that in 1980, as in the two or three years prior to that I had been aging ST scales from a variety of northcentral streams and had gotten used to the growth rates in that region. A sudden shift to SE Pa stream surveys on my part and the taking of scales from ST for age analysis from SE Pa infertile ST streams
certainly surprised me with respect to the faster growth rates, some of which most likely had to do with an extended growing season and the earlier occurrence of warmer water temps in spring.

As for Atlantic Salmon in the Delaware, any caught there were considered to be strays and an unusual catch was supposedly reported on occasion.

 

[JeffP]

Hey Jeff P. They are different fish. Second fish is a 12-1/2” , Third fish is 13-1/2”. Admittedly that is a very small net just for brook trout fishing. I know what you mean about the names we haven’t heard from in a while. It seems we lost a few people. Or maybe they are still lurking without posting ?

I wonder if some in here under different names.

 

[JeffP]

While my interest in native brook trout has gone up, my fishing has not. In the early days, I didn't take pictures. I think my biggest 2 brookies have come out Hammer Creek and Elk (on a spinner). I would say both came about 25 years ago.

 

[troutbert]

Contributing to the generalized length discrepancy of ST in SE Pa vs the rest of the state is the ST growth rates in SE Pa, which are greater than those in northcentral Pa freestoners as an example. I became especially aware of that in 1980, as in the two or three years prior to that I had been aging ST scales from a variety of northcentral streams and had gotten used to the growth rates in that region. A sudden shift to SE Pa stream surveys on my part and the taking of scales from ST for age analysis from SE Pa infertile ST streams
certainly surprised me with respect to the faster growth rates, some of which most likely had to do with an extended growing season and the earlier occurrence of warmer water temps in spring.

What are the growth rates for brook trout, i.e what are their lengths at different ages?

And were the SE PA streams with faster brookie rates normal freestone mountain streams, or were they streams with unusually good baseflows because of deep mine drainage?

 

[Mike]

What is this literature?

Smallmouth bass were native to the Ohio River drainage. They were not native to the Susquehanna and Delaware River drainages.

So they did not originally exist in Kettle, Pine and Loyalsock.

That’s correct, but doesn’t negate Salmonid’s specific comments about ST. It is possible that the larger streams in question were warm enough at least in their lower ends to support SMB had they been introduced prior to the vast amount of logging that took place. How warm these streams really were in the pre-logging days could be implied if some of the books written about ST in northcentral Pa also happened to mention other species that were caught as by-catch. Do they?

To somewhat illustrate my point, here’s an example from SE Pa, specifically the headwaters region of the Schuylkill R. The Schuylkill R proper almost certainly supported a ST population and even today supports a diminished population close to Port Carbon, located immediately upstream from Pottsville (The very headwaters support a good population).. The historical record describes the upper geographical limits of American shad, striped bass, and white perch movements or catches as being Port Carbon. These species temperature preferences certainly differ from the temperature preferences of ST, which suggests to me that longitudinally the Schuylkill may have started to seasonally warm beyond the temp preferences of ST upon reaching the Port Carbon area or that the sparse leading edge of these migratory fish populations pushed upstream as far as Port Carbon into water temps that allowed some overlap throughout the year just like striped bass (limited numbers), BT and RT overlap in a portion of the upper Delaware. Knowing how fish species populations transition longitudinally…usually somewhat gradually without human influence on water temps… the historical comments do not suggest to me that there was absolutely no overlap among the migratory species and residents (ST) in Port Carbon, at least on a seasonal basis. It only suggests to me that Port Carbon may have been geographically close to the point where ST populations dropped off substantially in a downstream direction absent additional cooling from tribs, such as the West Branch. The point here is that with some sense of species composition or mix, one can derive a better sense of what may have been true and what may have been angling lore.


So, you readers of all things brook trout and/or Pa angling history, do any authors shed light on other species that were present in these larger northcentral Pa streams that individuals associate with larger ST of the past, such as the Loyalsock, Pine, or Kettle? If so, are the geographical locations mentioned or implied along with the species that are mentioned?

 

[Mikey2006]

I’ve seen a few pushing 10 inches in south central pa and two probably close to 11, although the biggest I’ve caught is 9 inches. In fact two days ago on a small rhododendron choked stream where you have to crawl for most of the day if you want to head upstream, I saw one that was over 10 inches maybe pushing 11 but definitely no more than that. Against the white bottom you could clearly see the entire fish as it swam away, it was big. The stream flows into a lake downstream where I’ve seen a picture of someone holding a 13 Incher (they don’t stock the lake or anything upstream of it) and I have barely explored any of the actual stream so it wouldn’t surprise me if there was even bigger fish moving in between the lake and the stream and further up the stream.

 

[FrankTroutAngler]

What are the growth rates for brook trout, i.e what are their lengths at different ages?

And were the SE PA streams with faster brookie rates normal freestone mountain streams, or were they streams with unusually good baseflows because of deep mine drainage?

I was recently reading the PFBC’s “Evaluation of Catch-and-Release Regulations on Brook Trout in Pennsylvania Streams” scientific study and found this:

“Based on back-calculated length-at-age data for Brook Trout in 48 Pennsylvania headwater streams from 1978 to 1990, average length at age 3 was 165 mm (6.50”) at age 4 was 184 mm (7.24”), at age 5 was 201 mm (7.91”), and at age 6 was 215 mm (8.46”) (PFBC, unpublished).”

I'm fairly certain the headwater streams surveyed were in NCPA, but I'm not sure. This, of course, does not address growth rates of native brook trout in SEPA to my knowledge.