Dam release spawns unwanted trout and loss of chub
Friday, February 11, 2011 at 12:00AM 
Your tax dollars at work.
Prior to the building of the Glen Canyon Dam, the humpback chub lived throughout the Colorado River system in Arizona and Utah. However the dam, among other things, destroyed the habitat of the chub and it was added to the endangered species list in 1967. So the Bureau of Reclamation has been creating artificial floods to restore the habitat and the endangered minnow. Only one problem, the increased flows resulted in an 800% increase in rainbow trout populations who like to feed on...wait for it..... humpback chub. So now the Bureau of Reclamation is again proposing to kill thousands of trout using electroshock, perhaps annually for up to a decade, and at a cost of millions of dollars to taxpayers, to protect the chub.
To top it all off researchers aren't even sure that removing the trout, as they did between 2003 and 2006, will do much good.
FYI....the Feds don't electroshock the 15 miles of tailwater below the dam that encompasses Lees Ferry.
LINK (Via:The AZ Daily Sun)
fish in the news, humpback chub in Environment, News
Reader Comments (3)
Added to the millions of dollars already being spent killing trout/bass/pike/catfish on the upper Colorado and lower Yampa. The shocking boats come back every year........
Hey I think we should be a little understanding here. If we ask the government to tear down dams and restore the threatened fish of the Columbia, can't we see allowing for them trying to preserve the unique fish in the Colorado. Or is this a case of "we only want to save the fish we like to catch". I love rainbow trout as much as the next guy, but I see these folks really trying to do some good and this response looks a lot like a Monday morning quarterback session to me.
Based on what was written in the original article, the trout response wasn't predicted. Basically it was a screw-up, if it could have been predicted at all. So now it will cost a bunch of money to try and fix it. That said, if you fully support the protection and re-establishment of endangered native fish in the Colorado (and I do) you have to take a more long-term view of the costs. Nobody likes having to spend that money fixing a mistake, but I'll take it over losing the chub any day.