It’s a Bad Day For Orange County Trout: Mudslide Buries Last Members of Isolated Population
By Tom Chandler on Dec 12, 2007 in News
From the Orange County Register:
It was a race against time for the rainbow trout in Orange County’s Harding Canyon, but biologists say they lost the race: a mudslide buried the last members of an isolated population before they could be collected and moved.
The trout possessed the capacity to turn into protected southern steelhead – if they could have reached the ocean. They were one of several such remnant populations in Southern California.
In one rolling slump, the mudslide apparently wiped out one of Orange County’s last clusters of native rainbow trout – and possibly, the very last.
“What we feared, happened,” said Adam Backlin, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. “The hillsides just slumped into the canyon, and buried the entire creek.”
Irony abounds here; if development hadn’t barred these trout from reaching the ocean, they would have been classified as steelhead (a protected species in Southern California) and accorded special care.
Happy Holidays, Harding Canyon Trout. This year, you get the grim reaper instead of the fat guy in the red suit.
You can read the Orange County Register story here: Mudslide wipes trout off OC map
The Day Tripper | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
That’s terrible