Parks Canada is seeing success for a threatened fish species returning to its traditional habitat (in restoring a threatened fish species to its traditional habitat) in Banff National Park.
After more than a decade of work, the federal agency said westslope cutthroat trout are beginning to spawn naturally and repopulate Hidden Lake (re-establish their population in Hidden Lake), close to Lake Louise.
Shelley Humphries, an aquatics specialist for Parks Canada’s Lake Louise, Yoho and Kootenay field unit, said they’re now self-sustaining (the population is now self-sustaining).
“It’s so amazing … We’re not going to have to worry about them up there,” she said. “We were pretty sure it was all going to work because in the United States this work is done all the time and it’s led to some delistings.”
Humphries said work began to naturally remove (remove) brook trout in 2011, but ultimately didn’t work (was unsuccessful).
They used rotenone — a natural fish poison — to take out (eliminate) brook trout in 2018 and 2019.
They started putting eggs in Hidden Lake in 2021 for four straight years, which led to successful spawning and fully grown fish showing up this year (the emergence of mature fish this year).
She said they’ll continue to monitor, but the hope is to see them use streams and creeks to go beyond Hidden Lake (expand their population into surrounding streams and creeks).
“Overall, the numbers are in really good shape,” Humphries said. “We just want to see them now spawning in the streams because there are some places in the stream we’re also expecting them to spawn in the future, not just up in the headwater lake.”
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