Freestone vs. Limestone Streams (fish coloration,size and strength/weight) Long post

[Chaz]

What Troutbert said, tigers have a mix of each species marking and they are very odd looking when comepared to the two parents. I have seen brookies with what I'll call heavy marking for want of abetter word. I've caught these colorful fish in two places, Slate Run in the headwaters, and Peters Creek. The vermiculations are much more bold, that'sabout the only way I can describe the fish. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of these rare brookies.
Note also that the angle of Sal's shot makes it hard to see the red dot and blue halos, but they are there. I once caught a brookie that had only there red dots and blue halos on one side and two on the other side. I remember the place I caught it also had extremely colorful brookies.

 

[DGC]

Mother nature is a mad scientist and I don't put anything past her. The Tiger trout from what I recall is a cross between a Female brown and a male brook. I don't know about anyone else but to me the Tiger's appearance favors the father's side of the union. One of these days a Tiger is going to come out fertile, maybe already has but is so rare we don't know it. What happens when that guy pairs up with a brown? What would those offspring look like? Then you start getting family tree like permutations for the pairings of those offspring, and so on. What would they look liike? That's the kind of thing I was trying to get at in the first sentence. I'm certainly not making a claim that the trout shown is a hybrid.

But just for the sake theoretical interest, what would a viable, fertile brook/brown hybrid look like? Would that be a good thing or a bad thing? Will evolution bring this about eventually? What would the leading edge of this change look like? I'm drawn to that kind of speculation.

As for the red spots on the dorsal fin, earlier in this thread I speculated that popluations of browns showing that characteristic are likely indicative of relatively undisturbed, heritage strain Brown trout, basing that on a discussion in Lloyd Gonzales' s Fly Fishing Pressured Waters. Using the well-known identification key Troutbert provided, and following the example from Gonzales, you'd have to go with a pure strain brown, about as pure as they get in PA.

But Fishidiot mentions that red-spotted caudals on Browns are not unusual, so unfortunately I'll have to look elsewhere for a genetic purity indicator. As an artist he would have a keen eye for that detail.

I have to admit I've been struggling to shorten my posts but recent experience suggests clarity and brevity don't seem to go together for me.

 

[TheDude]

Oh man, no I did not know troutbert is Dwight. That was a such a cool occurrence! Look at Post 55 and then 56. That's just ridiculous!

 

[MKern]

I don't really see them as blue halos, but more iridesient areas around the red spots, which I would bet that most browns have.
Remember what they see and what we see are totaly different. Maybe those areas glow in the dark.

 

[TheDude]

I definitely see them as blue pigment, rather than iridescence.

By the way, here are some examples of what Chad mentioned about a trout's color being very relative depending on the angle the camera shoots it at. I can also add that camera settings have a huge impact on how close the image looks to what the eye saw.

This is the same brookie photographed without a flash, and then with a flash. Notice how dark the fish looks in the blury picture. That's closer to how it looked to my eye. Often a flash does not make a trout look better, but in this case it was around sunset and the natural light was low. I also had lowered the flash power so that it was be softer than usual.

Then there is the same brown twice, both pictures without a flash, but if told they were two different fish, many people would say the one has much deeper colors than the other.

The point being that you can't judge the looks of a fish by a picture, especially when you can see the light reflecting off the metallic-looking parts.