Here’s part of an article by Mike Stark of the Billings Gazette concerning the Park’s gill netting efforts on Yellowstone Lake….

The more nets they throw into Yellowstone Lake, the more pesky lake trout they seem to catch.

At Yellowstone National Park, the uphill struggle continues to catch and kill as many non-native lake trout as possible in order to preserve dwindling numbers of native Yellowstone cutthroat trout. Lake trout eat the cutts in great numbers.

Park Service crews pulled in their last nets of the year on Tuesday, ending yet another record catch on the lake.

The six-month gill-netting effort killed 73,279 lake trout, said Patricia Bigelow, a Yellowstone fisheries biologist who oversees the program. That’s 13,000 more than caught last year and twice the number netted two years ago.

All told, more than 268,250 lake trout have been removed from the lake since the program started in 1994.

Even so, the work seems only to be curbing the explosive growth of lake trout in the lake, not driving down overall numbers, Bigelow said.

And it isn’t just the yearly catch that’s increasing. Over the past several years, the rate at which fish are caught — measured by the number of nets used each day — has risen, too.

You can read the full article in the Casper Star Tribune by clicking this link.

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