Mexican native trouts: a review of their history and ... - Webspace

292
mentioned here are 3–4 years prior to those on
his specimens at USNM – Table 1], from San
Francisco, came from some scientific institution
to study these trout. My boss, Mr. C.H. Cooper,
the company manager, told me to accompany Mr.
Miller to the different places where trout were
more plentiful. We camped out several days and
Miller, who must have been about 70 years old,
collected hundreds of specimens, from tiny half
inch fry up to 8–9 inches. I think we had about 8 or
10 gallon jugs filled with formaldehyde in which
he put all he caught. He used seines, and he stirred
up the fish by hand in the cavities alongside the
streams, and when he had had enough we came
back to the lumber camp. These jugs were well
packed in lumber crates for protection and taken
back to the States by Miller. I was called to the
Army in 1943 and do not know what the outcome
of this trip was.
On several occasions when fishing on a stream
south of El Salto called La Rosilla creek, I caught
several trout which were entirely different. Larger
(11-13-inches long), and the meat was of different
color, rather salmon colored; the meat on the
others was cream colored. I am listing the names of
the main streams where we used to fish: La Rosilla,
Arroyo del Agua, Las Adjuntas, San Juan, Bajio
Seco, Arroyo Hondo (I fished this last one about
a couple of years ago and only caught three over
a period of five hours, the longest one was about
8-inches long), Paso de las Mulas, San Esteban,
etc. People say that the streams are pretty well
fished out, and there are other factors which do not
make camping out as safe as it used to be. It makes
me feel pretty good that Dad sent those five specimens
that you mentioned. I am surprised to hear
that trout have been planted up in those streams,
I’ve never heard about it from any other source.
I worked for the lumber company from 1937 to
1950, and have been going back very often, but I
never heard of the practice.
We interpret the information from the Bishop
family as supporting the hypothesis that trout are
native to the Río Presidio and other nearby drainages.
Despite Stilwell’s (Stilwell, 1948) suggestion to the
contrary, it seems highly unlikely that rainbow trout
could have been stocked and established over such an
extensive and remote area as Mr. Bishop describes
so quickly after the initial 1888 arrival of rainbow
trout eggs to the Mexico City area for cultivation. The
government’s trout culture guide published in 1892
(Secretaría de Fomento, 1892) stated (in its title) that
rainbow trout would first be available for distribution
(from the Chimaleápam station near Mexico City) in
1893, thus leaving only about 10 years for distant
and very remote parts of mountainous Durango to
be widely stocked and large populations to become
established for the far-flung fishing adventures of the
Bishop family (and others) by shortly after the turn
of the century. Additionally, if rainbow trout stocking
was so prevalent early-on, and particularly, as Stilwell
(Stilwell, 1948), Miller (1960) and Miller and Smith
(1986) argued, promoted by American workers in the
area, it seems unlikely that the Bishops, who obviously
spent much time fishing and were obviously leaders of
the American ex-patriot and local communities, would
not have known of the practice. Furthermore, simply
getting hatchery rainbow stock into the area at all was
not nearly as easy as Miller surmised. For example, the
railroad did not arrive to El Salto until the 1920s, prior
to which it was accessible only by a two or three-day
ride on mules from the capital city of Durango.
Seth Eugene Meek. Needham and Gard (1959)
correctly summarized Meek’s (1904) mention of
trout west of Ciudad Durango as well as E. W.
Nelson’s visit to El Salto and his obtaining a series of
specimens from there in the fall of 1907 (Evermann,
1908). Unfortunately, as seems to be the case with
other early collections of Mexican trouts, the 1907
specimens (and apparently any that Nelson may
have collected to the same area on his visit in 1898
(Evermann, 1908)) disappeared and were never
described.
Aldo Leopold. Two visits to the Sierra Madre Occidental
between 1936 and 1938 had a profound effect
on Aldo Leopold, one of the most influential thinkers
in conservation history (Forbes and Haas, 2000).
Leopold’s unusually perceptive field skills led him
to question the impact of modern man on the pineoak
ecosystem of the southwestern United States, and
sound a surprisingly early warning against genetic
contamination of native trouts by introduced stocks
(Leopold, 1918). He also warned against overgrazing
that was already leading to brush encroachment,
erosion, and altered fire and hydrological
regimes in the southwestern U.S. (Leopold, 1924).
Upon becoming the nation’s first professor of wildlife
management in the 1930s, Leopold tried to resolve
widespread deer population explosions, and visited