Conservation

Parks' Fly Shop is deeply committed to protecting the wild trout of Yellowstone and their habitat. Read on to learn about some critical dangers to local fisheries and ways to help combat them.

Many of the current and potential threats to Yellowstone-area (and all) fisheries are caused by invasive species. For more information, we encourage you to visit Protect Your Waters, a site dedicated to explaining the threats of invasive species and how to guard against these threats.

Whirling disease is an ailment that affects young trout, especially rainbows and cutthroats. It is caused by a parasite originally native to Europe (like Zebra Mussels, Eurasian Milfoil, and other invasive exotics) that attacks the spines of young fish, deforming their bones and leading to a characteristic circular swimming motion. Death is usually the ultimate result. While the primary vector for transmission of this disease is stocking of infected trout, it can be transmitted by anglers who do not thoroughly clean their gear before moving from a stream where the parasite is present to one where it is not.

In the Yellowstone National Park area, WD heavily infects Yellowstone Lake and its tributaries, including the Yellowstone River above the falls. The low, warm water of the last several summers and the slow, silty flows of many sections of these streams are prime conditions to create intense infestations of the disease-causing parasite. The Madison River outside the Park suffered greatly during the 1990s from the disease, though it has recovered significantly. If anglers are careful to clean their gear to avoid transmitting the disease to new waters inside Yellowstone, odds are good that the Yellowstone River and the small tributaries to Yellowstone Lake will recover.

Mud snails are a small exotic species of snail that are of no nutritional value to local fish species. They are filter feeders that can breed exponentially due to their lack of predators in North America, and when unchecked they can reach sufficient densities to significantly disrupt the base of the food chain by consuming the available food that native trout stream insects such as mayflies, caddisflies, etc. depend upon, thus ultimately impacting trout populations. They are highly resistant to changing water temperatures, drying, and can survive being eaten by a trout by retracting into their indigestible shells. They are also small enough that they're almost impossible to detect visually (being smaller, in some cases, than the period at the end of this sentence). Thus it is vitally important that anglers clean and disinfect their gear thoroughly to avoid transmitting the parasite to new waters.

In the Yellowstone area, mud snails are found in the Firehole, Gibbon, and Madison Rivers and their tributaries, the Lewis River tributary Crawfish Creek, and in the Paradise Valley Spring Creeks. Be sure to clean your gear after fishing these waters, or in the case of Crawfish Creek after wading down it to reach the Lewis, using the technique described below.

Rainbow and cutthroat trout are closely related, closely enough that they can hybridize and produce fertile offspring. Cutthroat trout are the region's only native trout species, and both the two subspecies found in the area, the Westslope and Yellowstone subspecies, are classified as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The Yellowstone cutthroat is specifically found in less than three percent of its historic range. Rainbow trout, as most readers are probably already aware, have been widely stocked and are now found around the world, though they are native only to watersheds draining to the Pacific.

While fisheries managers originally attempted to "help" nature by stocking rainbows in the Yellowstone area, biologists now recognize the importance of preserving species diversity and preventing non-native species from interfering with natives. For many years, rainbows did not expand their range much from the original locations where they were stocked, preserving cutthroat populations in close to a genetically-pure state. After several years of low water and perhaps illegal "bucket biologist" introductions, rainbows have begun expanding their range into the upper meadows of Slough Creek, the Lamar River including Soda Butte Creek, and the Yellowstone up to the base of the Lower Falls.

Because Yellowstone regulations allow up to five rainbows to be kept, Park biologists encourage anglers to keep or even simply to kill any rainbows they catch in Slough Creek above the campground, in the Lamar, and in Soda Butte Creek. I also suggest killing any caught in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, from the Lamar upstream to the Falls. Since rainbows and cutthroats hybridize to produce offspring that bear a mixture of their parents' physical traits, identification of hybrids compared to pure-strain fish is quite difficult. Under Park regulations, a cutthroat is defined as any fish with visible red, pink, orange, or yellow throat markings. If you're unsure if the fish you're holding is a cutt-bow hybrid or a rainbow, let it go. If the fish lacks throat slashes, kill it. If enough anglers can move past their usually commendable tendency towards catch and release fishing in this case, rainbows should be held in check sufficiently for cutthroat populations in the fabled waters of the Lamar drainage and Yellowstone River to remain almost pure.

Yellowstone Lake was historically home only to cutthroat trout, and it produced them in dramatic abundance. Unfortunately, in the mid-late 1980s a misguided or malicious angler or group of anglers illegally introduced lake trout from Lewis Lake into Yellowstone Lake. Since lake trout grow quite large, they are able to consume great numbers of both juvenile and adult cutthroats. Since the mid-90s, cutthroat populations in Yellowstone Lake have crashed, threatening fisheries in both Yellowstone Lake and the fabled upper Yellowstone River, including "Buffalo Ford" and the Thorofare. More critically, the Yellowstone Lake cutthroat, like salmon in Pacific Coast streams, forms the linchpin to the ecosystem surrounding the lake, providing food for grizzly bears, otters, osprey, gulls, pelicans, and many other species, and creating indirect effects for many others. Lake trout, since they dwell in deep water and are thus unavailable to predators (or most anglers) for most of the year do not fill this niche, placing many of the species that make Yellowstone famous besides its fish in danger.

Park regulations require anglers to kill all lake trout caught in Yellowstone Lake, with no daily or possession limits. They are most available to anglers in the West Thumb area of the lake, and to shore anglers in the two weeks after the lake opens and again from mid-September until the close of the Park season. The Park Service runs gillnets aggressively in areas with known lake trout populations, but anglers can do their part as well. New areas with heavy concentrations of lake trout are being identified every year, so check with the Park Service or with us for more specific information.

Cleaning your gear properly is by far the most important and most critical method you can use to prevent the spread of exotic species like the parasite that causes Whirling Disease and New Zealand mud snails. Follow the guidelines this link directs you to, posted by Protect Your Waters.

Bear Creek Council is a local, grassroots organization dedicated to protecting the environmental health of the Gardiner area. Among the issues Bear Creek Council has worked on are preventing the reopening of the TVX mine at the headwaters of Bear Creek, thereby reducing the potential for a devastating cyanide release into the Yellowstone River. Currently Bear Creek is working on a campaign to reduce Gardiner's energy use by promoting renewable energy, educating local residents on how to cut their electricity usage, and providing recycling facilities. Eventually we hope to make Gardiner completely reliant on Green Energy, a real possibility due to many local sites suitable for wind energy turbines. Bear Creek has also fought proposals to clear cut large swaths of the the Gallatin National Forest and worked with the Bison Field Campaign to create a commonsense approach to managing bison that leave Yellowstone during the winter months, rather than simply rounding them up for slaughter out of a misguided belief that they pose a threat to local ranchers. Richard Parks has served a past president of both Bear Creek Council and the Northern Plains Resource Council, the umbrella group with which Bear Creek is affiliated.

We are also affiliated with national groups including FFF, TU, the Western Organization of Resource Councils, and others.

Contact Information
Phone:	(406) 848-7314
Address:	PO Box 196 202 Second Street South (US-89) Gardiner, MT 59030
E-Mail	Richard Parks, Owner Walter Wiese, Head Guide