"There's better survival and performance out of these fish, especially in a somewhat thermally challenged river."
Brian Eltz
It's the fall trout-stocking season for Connecticut's rivers and streams. I met up with a team of scientists and volunteers to learn more about the journey trout take from hatchery to stream.
Brian Eltz said this was a good year for trout fishermen. "One fisherman we spoke with today had caught 40 trout yesterday," he said. "Another angler stated that this is his best year fishing here since 2009."
Eltz is a fisheries technician with the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. We were on the banks of the Housatonic River in Cornwall, one of 14 different locations where Eltz and other biologists are stocking a special breed of brown trout called "survivor strain" (pictured below). "There's better survival and performance out of these fish," he said, "especially in a somewhat thermally challenged river like this."
The program was piloted in the Farmington River.
Eltz said survival strain trout are caught from the Farmington River and bred with other wild fish in hatcheries. That makes them genetically stronger and more resilient to summer fluctuations in temperature that could force them from rivers into cooler streams.
About 250 fish go in the river at each stop. They're kept in a cooled truck and scooped into nets while a biologist in waders runs them down into the river to get them in the water as quickly as possible.
Mike Humphreys is another biologist outfitted in waders. After explaining the basics of trout biology to some young children, he told me the state started developing the "survivor strain" in the early 1990s. The program was piloted in the Farmington River and today, he said, the fish are doing well.
"The past two years, every fish that we collected that had been in the river one or more -- some up to three years -- were survivor strain," Humphreys said. "Even though we were putting almost equal numbers of fish in there ... they live longer. They're more adapted to the wild."
By the end of the year, DEEP estimates it will have put about 750,000 trout in around 300 bodies of water across Connecticut.