Easy there dryflyguy. I think you made an excellent point there, but the locations of those streams should not be discussed in an open forum. Brook trout are protected in Ohio, and at one point they were down to a about 3 hundred fish left in one tiny ditch. And they almost lost those too. They are trying to re-establish them in a few other streams with mixed results. This is very delicate IMHO, and a few curious lurkers could do some real damage to this effort. For example, all but 8 fish (1 female and 7 males) were stolen one year from a small private hatchery.
On the other hand, if a few people didn’t know about those last few natives, they would have been lost, too. So, you both have a good point. Publicity can be good for the stream, but it also can be bad. You have to weigh both sides. The decision should be clear on this one. These fish have some protection now, and more publicity is bad. Like I said earlier, it depends on the stream.
P.S. When the streams were mentioned here awhile back, I chose not to respond with the hopes that the discussion would go away. It did.
Edit: As it turned out, native brood stock were stolen on 2 occasions (from 2 locations). the second one, they got all but 2 fish. That was out of a total of 110 fish.
