The FATC used one of their most valuable resources in the area – Jennifer Girondo, our fisheries management biologist to answer a few questions that we had on spawning rainbows and stocking brown trout in the Meramec river. Normally rainbows spawn in the spring but here in Missouri some spawn in the fall.  It seems during this spawning period the rainbows are not interested much in eating except for the small rainbows waiting for the “eggs” to appear as they swim below the redds.  Although not interested much in eating they will do whatever to protect their redds from predators. A couple of things that we should learn from Jennifer’s answer to the FATC. First, rainbows do spawn and sometimes successfully in our blue-ribbon areas. So, know our blue-ribbon rivers and if you see spawning rainbows – leave them alone. Do not fish to them or walk on their redds.

River area                                                                                                    County

Reference stocking browns in the Meramec river, it is happening now.  The MDC has decided to stock from October to March this year. The tattoo will be red/orange on the left eye. Instead of a different color each month they will keep the same color for the year.

Here is Jennifer’s email to the FATC:

Hi Kenny – 

Regarding the rainbows spawning – usually the male sweeps the redd and it’s the female hanging out close by.  Both the males and females do produce eggs/milt and release them into the streambed and cover them to keep the sunlight off them.  The bottleneck for rainbow spawning is usually the next step, where fertilized eggs would need to develop & hatch, and the young fry survive the first couple months.  If enough oxygen doesn’t get to the eggs, if they get uncovered, and/or it’s not the proper temperatures, or we have a flood that shifts the substrate, then the redds don’t produce anything.  There’re only a few streams in the state where that happens consistently (the blue-ribbon areas).  On some of the blue-ribbon areas, the spawn may take place closer to Christmas. The females usually just spawn once, and then they’d be back to “normal” feeding; the males may keep at for a bit longer and have a little longer that aren’t interested in food. The fish may be disinterested for a while around that day/week, but generally there isn’t a month or anything where the bite is completely off.  Sometimes the fish “feed” by trying to chase off anything that nears their redd, so the spawn may be a good time to try to fish; unless you’re in a blue-ribbon area, the spawning fishing won’t hurt much in the overall population.    

The brown trout this year will all have the same color – we called it “red”, but I can see where folks may think “orange”.  And yes, it’s on the left.  We used the multi-colors in several other years where we wanted to see if a certain month stocking fared better than others, and we haven’t seen it make a difference in the overall survival.  It’s more efficient for us to just use one color for the year, since we’re not getting any benefit out of using unique colors for each stocking.  I believe most of the November browns have already been stocked.  We’re starting to shift to a longer release period (September-ish to March-ish), so the stockings are more spread out than we’d been doing in the past.  We’re only seeing about 6 months of survival in our stockers, so we’re trying to spread them out more to cover the summer months better.  We do plan to do some additional tracking next year.

Jen

Jennifer Girondo
Fisheries Management Biologist