I seem to be writing a fair number of interviews these days; I just posted an interesting 2300 word interview with Anders Halverson on the CalTrout website.



Halverson wrote the surprisingly riveting An Entirely Synthetic Fish-- the story of the spread of the rainbow trout across the United States. Despite it being the winner of the 2010 National Outdoor Book Award, I expected the book to be dry and lifeless, but Halverson's an excellent storyteller, and I gave it an excellent review on the Underground.

I like doing interviews with interesting people, and in this one Halverson touches on a handful of subjects, including these two startling factoids about interbreeding of frogs and fish:

Q: Are hatcheries less harmful than they used to be?**
Yes. They've gotten much smarter about the genetics and and other aspects of fish culture. For example, they've gotten much better about collecting and using wild fish in their spawning operations.

Nevertheless, whenever you raise something in a hatchery, it's an artificial environment with very different selection pressures. The fish that come out are very different from the fish that are spawned in the wild.

My graduate work in frogs taught me that these systems are far more complex than we realize. We don't have any real idea what's happening out there.

For example, in one of my experiments, I put fences around these ponds and captured every frog that was coming into breed. I took a tissue sample from everyone. Then I used DNA fingerprinting to identify all their offspring, and it was clear that the frogs had somehow recognized their close kin and avoided breeding with them.

It was also clear that the more inbred the tadpoles were, the less likely they were to make it out of the pond.

Q: Wow.
The tools we have -- we're just wandering around out there with a bludgeon.

As another example, I recently heard a talk about a study in the Smokies (ED: Great Smoky Mountains National Park); they removed rainbows from a stream and stocked brookies from three different tributaries, and 15 years later, their offspring show no signs of interbreeding. Nobody knows why.

When we approach these problems, we need to recognize our limitations, and structure our solutions accordingly.

Let's just ignore the fact that I responded to an award-winning author's insightful answer with "wow" (clearly a career highlight). Instead let's focus on the fact that frogs and brookies know enough not to interbreed with kin, but apparently many humans don't.

In a less cynical vein, there's his exploration of the now-infamous poisoning of the Green River, the location of the first hatchery on the McCloud River (currently under 300 feet of water), and even rubber vs felt.

Read every word of the interview's essential goodness here.

See you on Charlie Rose, Tom Chandler.