30 July 2015

The "highly piscivorous" tiger trout

The tiger trout... is a sterile, intergeneric hybrid of the brown trout (Salmo trutta) and the brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis). The name derives from the pronounced vermiculations, evoking the stripes of a tiger. It is an anomaly in the wild, with the brook trout having 84 chromosomes and the brown trout 80. Records show instances as far back as 1944. The cross itself is unusual in that the parents are members of different genera...

Tiger trout can be produced reliably in hatcheries. This is done by fertilizing brown trout eggs with brook trout milt and heat shocking them, which causes creation of an extra set of chromosomes and increases survival from 5% to 85%...

Tiger trout are known to be highly piscivorous (fish-eating), and are a good control against rough fish populations...Their own population numbers can be tightly controlled as well, since they are sterile.
Photo cropped for size from original found at Reddit.
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5 comments:

  1. jennifer from pittsburghJuly 30, 2015 at 2:11 PM

    Fascinating!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ann BennettJuly 30, 2015 at 10:06 PM

    "highly piscivorous" Who knew?

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownJuly 30, 2015 at 10:47 PM

    Jeff Goldblum has a word of warning for this "sterile" claim.

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SkWeMvrNiOM

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousJuly 31, 2015 at 8:43 AM

    beautiful coloring! similar to a chain pickerel?

    I-)

    ReplyDelete
  5. BarbwireAugust 1, 2015 at 8:03 PM

    Do they eat those huge jumping foreign carp?

    ReplyDelete

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