Bonneville Cutthroat making a comeback!

There is such pressure on flowing water resources to meet the growing demands of our human economy that we sometimes think that the pressures are too much and the outlook is bleak. And working on raising awareness about native fishes is a greater challenge than birds that migrate and visit your feeders and capture your imagination about the mysteries of migration.

However, this recent news story about the Bonneville Cutthroat recovery is a great example of what it takes for restoration to be successful. Time is the number one factor and eternal vigilance and hope is another. We will be discussing the concept of time throughout this course and this news story about the Bonneville cutthroat covers about 34 years since Don Duff discovered a pure Bonneville cutthroat, thought to be extinct since the 1950s. 34 years is an example of 'career time' and for many tough managment problems "It takes a career"

A longer time frame is needed to understand the evolutionary history of the Bonneville cutthroat and its dynamic native habitats of the Bonneville basin. Explaining the patterns of freshwater fish distributions in North America requires an understanding of events of the Pleistocene, a period that began approximately 2-3 million years ago and lasted until approximately 10,000 years ago. Before this period an ancestral salmonid Eosalmo driftwoodensis was living and swimming the coastal regions of remnants of the supercontinent Laurasia. It is thought that about 2 million years ago a common trout ancestor separated into two evolutionary lines, one being the cutthroat and the other the rainbow trout and its related species. It wasn't until the emergence of the Rocky mountains and effects of glaciation during the Pleistocene ice ages that the streams and rivers were accessible and suitable for the anscestors of the Cutthroat trout to colonize. The erosion of these new mountains over thousands of years and stream captures or headwater transfers allowed the ancestral trouts to spread. The Cutthroat (Oncorhynchus clarki) persisted and evolved in a number of basins including the Lake Bonneville. Lake Bonneville diminished and its vestiges Great Salt Lake is devoid of fishes leaving the Bonneville cutthroat trout to perist in isolated drainages and Bear Lake. So the Bonneville cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarki utah) is evolutionarily significant as it diverged from other cutthroat trout for perhaps 1 million years. This unique sub species has adapted to range of climatic variability of this region as was present as stream channels evolved during the Pleistocene period. Without the re-discovery of the pure Bonneville cutthroat by Don Duff in 1974, the restoration would not be possible. It is also the state fish of Utah.

In his essay Round River, Aldo Leopold wrote " If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering." Through the decades since the Endangered Species Act was past, many have argued over the designation of the Bonneville cutthroat as a protected sub species. Efforts to protect and restore have been successful and give us all reason to be optimistic.