Trout

I was thinking about fish the other day and decided to paint a couple.

I love fish - I eat them raw. I like to fly fish too but haven't for 25 years. Catch and release is a tough one for me. Confronted with the decision to release or kill and eat the poor little thing might pose a moral dilemna I am not willing to tackle yet.

I was so bad at fly fishing I quit. But like the way golf keeps you in the game if you have one good shot out of fifty, that three inch brookie I did catch one day keeps me thinking about getting back into it someday. I still have my rod and reel hanging from a old rusty nail in the shed just in case. There's something about walking along a stream in the western mountains of Maine, being eaten alive by black flies and having my fly get caught for the twentieth time in the trees hanging overhead because I haven't perfected my roll cast, that makes me think I gave up too easily.

So what do fish do in the winter I wondered? We all pretty much know that, like bears, they hibernate -  eat very little, and slow down to consume less oxygen. What I didn't know was that the real danger to fish is not freezing to death but suffocating. Ice on the water's surface makes it hard for oxygen in the air to dissolve in the water, but if there is is water underneath, no problem. If a body of water freezes completely from the surface to the bottom, fish cannot survive for long-unless they are like the Antarctic icefish, which has chemicals resembling antifreeze in its blood to help it survive in water below freezing temperatures. So then I got curious and went on a search and find for fun facts.

1.  Genetically different trout are capable of spawning together and producing viable offspring but many have remained distinct for thousands of years. This happens because they have different life strategies e.g. their choice of spawning locations and timing or adaptations to exploit different niches within the food chain.

2.  Brown trout have between 38 and 42 pairs of chromosomes. Humans have only 23 pairs.

3. Large trout can eat large prey. For example, it is thought that large New Zealand trout feed on the periodic plagues of mice. Large brown trout will feed on small terrestrial animals that fall into the water, such as baby birds falling from overhanging nests, or even swimming mice or voles.

4. Trout have teeth on the roof of the mouth, called vomerine teeth, and this helps to distinguish trout from salmon.

5. Trout scales have growth rings, as new hard tissue is added around the edges as they grow. They can be read just like growth rings in a tree.

6.  Trout have body language. When competing for a ‘lie’ they will posture and ‘gape’ by opening their mouths wide and flaring the gills whilst advancing on their opponent. Fighting is kept to a minimum. Submissive fish close their mouth, contract their fins, go pallid and drop towards the stream bed.

7.  Trout don’t have scales for the first month of their life.

8. The majority of trout die before their first birthday. Mortality rates in their first year of life are typically 95% or greater, falling to around 40 - 60% in subsequent years. Brown trout can reach the ripe of age of 20 years.

10. Trout can rapidly change colour, getting darker when being aggressive, lighter
when being submissive or in response to changing background colour.

 11.  Salmon and trout can interbreed and do produce hybrids.

12.   A typical female brown trout produces about 2,000 eggs per kilogram (900 eggs per pound) of body weight at spawning.

13.   Trout, like most other fish, cannot regulate their body temperature – they tick over at the same temperature as the water in which they swim.

14.   A Trout can look and focus out of both corners of each eye simultaneously meaning that it can see in almost every direction at once.

15.  The earliest account of flyfishing (AD 200) is by the Roman scholar Aelian who recorded Macedonians ‘cast with rods to speckled fish’.

Trout • 8" x 8" watercolor framed to 12" x 12" • $200