I caught these fish in an Assynt hill loch last year. Could they be gillaroos?

Na! Yi only get gillaroos in Ireland.

No. They are a brace of rather dead brown trout...


http://www.shannon-fishery-board.ie/...t/gillaroo.htm

Link gives a short history of 'gillaroo' and where they occur, and sadly, where they used to occur.

Thanks for the link, Intelligent. Do I detect a note of disapproval?
Wild trout are scarce and precious in this country but Assynt is an exception. Many of the hill lochs are over-populated due to good spawning facilities and lack of predation. Given the often limited feeding, the locals state that they benefit from some judicious 'thinning out'.

To quote Stan Headley,
'Many, if not most trout lochs in Scotland will benefit from a seasonal cull, because most produce a surplus of fish in most seasons. For an angler to visit a loch where there is a vast population of fish and to return everything has a lot to do with anthropomorphic twaddle and nothing to do with rational assessment of good or bad practice...............most waters, left to their own devices will see individual size decrease and numbers increase. Selective culling and harvesting will naturally lead to bigger and better fish without compromising the welfare of the stock.'

So I kill a few and enjoy eating them.
I raised the Gillaroo question because there is a hill loch near Inchnadamph called the Gillaroo Loch.

Cheers.

A brace of Brown Trout which were probably delicious.

B.R.

A nice brace there - I bet they tasted good. It is utterly preposterous for someone to even hint that it is somehow irresponsible to take a wild brown trout or two for the pot from somewhere like Assynt

We tramped up to Gillaroo a few years ago, and managed a few fish like those pictured. Lovely spot.

They certainly were good eating, but are they gillaroos?

..........................

Not towards you no... my disapproval, I'm sorry - I didn't realize it had shown, was toward the decline, extinction in some loughs, of the 'gillaroo' in its native waters. This due mainly to habitat change and not angling pressure.


Very well put. I know of many such lakes, hardly fished, as they mostly hold stunted trout going 5 or 6 to the pound.

...and an unique thickened muscular stomach.




A Lough Melvin 'slam': brown, sonaghan and gillaroo.



Andrew Ferguson of the Zoology Department at Queen's University Belfast has long maintained they have remained genetically intact since the Ice Age.