The problem with dropping fish into alpine lakes

Key Takeaways

Today, we stock these lakes with helicopters often or airplanes, and there is incredible footage of airplanes literally dropping like hundreds or thousands of of fries out out of the plane and into the water. So, I wrote I wrote the story about what's called a fish stocking, and it's basically when states across the US put fish into rivers, lakes, and streams so that fishermen or anglers have something to catch. In many cases, the fish that they're putting into the water are not native species. A colleague just told me about a number of different environmental consequences of stocking non-native species. One of the top ones is when you stock alpine lakes or mountain lakes, these environments historically didn't have any fish whatsoever in them. So, it's basically introducing a predator into a lake that has never had fish before. And so, what you see is that where you have stocking in those lakes, you might have a drop in the number of tadpoles and therefore in the number of frogs or the number of salamanders. So, you have you basically have a foreign predator that's all of a sudden eating its way through these systems, and that can have effects that cascade throughout the ecosystem. So, birds like finches that rely on insects that are emerging from those lakes all all of a sudden don't have any food to eat or have less food to eat because you have a predator that's eating their food source. So, there are these effects that sort of trickle down the the the food chain. So, where you stock in alpine lakes, the consequences seem pretty clear and and can be negative.