IT SEEMED a brilliant idea in 1870: stock rivers and lakes with every angler’s dream fish – rainbow trout. A few decades on, the fish were being reared in vast hatcheries, and dumped from trucks and even aircraft across the US. In 1962, an entire river system was flooded with the poison rotenone to kill the native fish and clear the way for rainbow trout.
In California, the stocking trucks sounded a siren telling anglers to rush to the river banks and hook the new arrivals. Today alarm bells are ringing as ecologists begin to notice that competition, hybridisation and disease are devastating the native freshwater fauna.
It is an enthralling and sometimes appalling story, charting the origins of an ecological disaster fuelled by political game-playing, fantasies of virility and the enduring delusion that for any problem there will always be a technological fix.
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An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How rainbow trout beguiled America and overran the world
Yale University Press