What makes a fish a native? Our story yesterday on the city’s efforts to boost the trout population in Eleven Mile canyon raised that question.
A reader emailed me to quibble about our use of the word “native” in the headline.
Typically, if someone is born in a particular place, they are native to that particular place. If you’re born at University of Colorado Hospital, for example, you’re an Aurora native.
In the fish story, we called the trout native to Eleven Mile Canyon because they were born there, as opposed to stocked fish in other streams that were born in a Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife fish hatchery.
But in wildlife circles, “native” has a different meaning, and at least one reader objected to our use of the term. Because the rainbow trout species isn’t native to Colorado — it’s actually a west coast fish brought here decades ago — the reader said the word isn’t accurate here. The only native trout in Colorado, the reader pointed out, is the cut throat trout. On of those, the greenback cut throat, is the state’s official fish.
I understand the distinction here, but I don’t think native is inaccurate. As we said in the story, the rainbow trout in Eleven Mile are important because they aren’t stocked. For our purposes, those individual fish are native to the canyon, whether their ancestors were native to Colorado or not.