Hi all,

Just wondering if anyone has any ideas what the fish below is...

Caught it last week on the River Mur in Austria on a small black nymph. The stretch has lots of grayling , some very big huchen ( Danube salmon) and some rainbows, brook trout and browns.

It´s got ( more or less) the colouring of a brook trout but the body and head shape of a huchen - maybe a hybrid?



What do you reckon?

Damian F

That is a definately a Brook Trout, Salvelinus fontinalis known in Austria as "Roding" I think.
The shape is probably due to it being a stocked fish that is "going back "due to lack of food. It seems to have a "stockie tail"

While the Char family can interbreed I have never heard of them cross breeding with Hutchen Hucho hucho which are a completely different genus.

Brook Trout From the same family as Char and Arctic Char and easily confused when in "silver mode" They are a popular food fish in Austria becasue of their orange flesh and are frequently stocked.
(However just to confuse things they often appear on menus as "Fontenalis")




The above is an Arctic Char Salvelinus alpinus alpinus from Iceland of about 5lbs. All Char species get quite orange when they go into spawning colours.



That is a Brook Trout in more usual colouring, I know its a bad photo.

Cheers

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Chris REEVES

www.flydressersguild.org

Definitely a Brook Trout. Some, out-of-condition, rainbows in our reservoir look as long and lean and colourless as that one.

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How poor a thing, sometimes I find,
Will captivate a greedy mind - Isaac Walton.

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It is some kind of char . Hate so say which - I've caught char from Alaska right the way round to Sakhalin - very variable - could be a Brookie or an Arctic - definitely isn't a kurja variation ( Eastern russia ! )

Steve P

Salvelinus fontinalis or 'American Brook Trout' - she looks to be well on the mend after spawning exertions in Oct/Nov.

I understand the Müra, if you mean the river flowing through the city of Graz and then on to Slovenia and Hungary, forming the border before eventually joining the Danube, holds a lot of this species which originally escaped from Slovenian fish farms. Presumably there is an upstream spawning migration.

Wiley InterScience :: Session Cookies

Arctic charr do not occur the Danube/Black sea basin but some were landlocked in Alpine lakes after the last Ice Age.

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Save the softmouth trout

Brook trout, very similar to the artic char, i believe the same family


but its a brook trout

From the fins, it's certainly a brook trout (Salvelinus Fontinalis), but I'm going to add a twist here because that fish looks exactly like what we refer to as a "coaster" brook trout. These fish were once very common in the Upper Great Lakes, especially in Lake Superior and also in the tributaries to St. Lawrence River in Canada. There are also huge runs of them in tributaries to Hudson Bay, especially on the western shore where rivers like the Avon and the Sutton take huge runs of these fish.

A coaster is a brook trout that has a life cycle similar to the Atlantic Salmon or steelhead trout, where it's born in a river or stream and then it migrates out into a large body of water, either a big lake or the sea, then migrates back to the river of its birth each year to spawn. The fish in the picture looks EXACTLY like a coaster, they have much more of a silver color than a regular brook trout.

Like the steelhead/rainbow, there is no genetic difference between coasters and regular brook trout (that I'm aware of), it's just that for some reason the coaster feels the need to run to "sea".

Grouse

Hi all,

Thanks for everyone who´s taken the time to reply...looks like the jury might still be out.

A couple of things I should add - although the fish was long and lean it was solid muscle . I´ve had my share of flabby/wrecked fish over the years and this wasn´t one of them. The photo was taken at dusk with flash and doesn´t do the colour of the fish justice - it was beautifully marked. I´ve also had plenty of stocked saibling ( brook trout) from other waters, which looked pretty different ( much more rounded shape but thinner across the back). Also, the Mur isn´t stocked, so this is a wild fish (or maybe a descendent of an escapee or old stocking). The river is big and fast flowing and eventually enters the Danube flowing in a northerly direction, rather than southwards into Slovenia etc.

I think the idea of a recovering-after-spawning brook trout looks possibly the most likely so far...

Damian F

It's a really interesting puzzle, Damo. I'm 99% certain it's a brook trout, but it's certainly an unusual color given that it's from a tributary to the Danube and if I recall correctly the Danube runs to the Black Sea so it's unlikely to be a sea run fish. The Danube would be far to warm of water for a brook trout to survive in for that long of a run.


Brook trout are great fun to fish over here where they are native, I especially enjoy fishing them in the summer when there brown trout become very fussy and temperamental because of the heat. Brookies only inhabit the coldest of the cold water spring creeks, it's wonderful in July to go wading into a spring creek, it's like entering an air conditioned world all its own.

Grouse