A Brief History of Mexican Trout -- 1 2 3

The McCloud rainbows of 1888 were the first variety of rainbow trout introduced into Mexico.  Chazári wrote in an 1884 publication, "Piscicultura en Agua Dulce," that there were no rainbows in Mexican hatcheries at that time, but that they would like to procure some.

It is possible that the Ferrari-Perez trout are McCloud River rainbows from one of the Mexico City hatcheries, and that they were in Chicago as part of the impressive Mexican wildlife exhibit to show off the new hatchery trout; in which case they would not have come from Durango.  The question is intriguing, because if the trout were indeed collected by the Mexican Commission, they may have been collected in the 1880's as part of the biotic inventory, and therefore captured in the wild, probably before there were any hatchery trout in Mexico.  The U.S. National Museum has other specimens from the Chicago exhibit also collected by Fernando Ferrari-Perez and the Mexican Commission (again with incomplete collection data), and these are native fish from streams of Mexico.  We do not know if these fish were exhibited as live specimens, or if they were pickled prior to the Chicago exhibition.  Durango has at least 5 different Pacific watersheds which have native trout, and it's possible the specimens could have come from one of these drainages.

Carl Lumholz, the Swedish ethnographer who visited the Sierra Madre in the 1890's and studied the Tarahumaran (Rarámuri) Indians in Chihuahua, reported trout at several localities.  On the Rio Gavilan he reported taking with dynamite large "gila trout," along with suckers.  Though we cannot be certain that Lumholz was not referring to minnows of genus Gila, he was some 4 miles south of his camp which was made at 6,400 feet; an altitude that otherwise supports trout in the Yaqui watershed.  In another instance in the Rio Mayo basin, Lumholz was taking the trail that leads to the bottom of Basaseachi Falls, an 850 foot waterfall on the Rio Mayo, when he met an Indian boy climbing out of the barranca on the same trail .   He had been fishing for trout at the base of the waterfall -- undoubtedly the true trout of the Rio Mayo, known to be native to that river.

 American naturalist, Edward William Nelson, who was in the employ of the Smithsonian Institute, observed trout at two separate times in Mexico in l898.  Nelson was traveling with ornithologist Edward Goldman and was studying the birds of Mexico at the time, thus neglected to collect any specimens of the trout.  One observation was south of Guadalupe y Calvo on the slopes of Mt. Mohinora, where Nelson observed trout in a small arroyo.  The other sighting was in central Durango near the present-day town of El Salto, when Nelson saw trout in a headwater stream of the Rio del Presidio.  In 1907, Nelson was sent trout from the Presidio headwaters  by the American vice-consul to Durango, Mr. Walter C. Bishop. 

In 1905, Nelson again discovered trout, this time on the Baja peninsula of Mexico.  This time he was able to collect specimens -- from the Rio Santo Domingo -- which he shipped to Barton Evermann.   Evermann described the trout as a new subspecies of rainbow trout in a 1908 publication.

Seth Meek, an American who collected fishes extensively in Mexico, reported in 1904 that a Mr. John Ramsey told him that "trout are quite abundant in the upper tributaries of the Rio Yaqui." 

Meek also cites in his paper the report of Mr. A.V. Temple of the Mexican Central Railroad who told him that trout were present in Pacific coast streams west of Durango city. 

An American geologist, W.H. Seamon, writing from 1905 in Jorge Grigg's "Mines of Chihuhuahua," noted that trout were found in Rio Verde, at the crossing of the trail from Parral to Guadalupe y Calvo.  He stated that the "salmon trout" were easily lured by bait, but that they would refuse all flies.

Chester Lamb and A.E. Borell made the next scientific collections of trout from the Baja pensinsula, this in l925.  In the late l930's, researcher Paul Needham of the University of California at Berkeley journeyed to the Baja peninsula and collected trout for study, including some specimens brought back alive.  In 1937, Needham returned with 55 yearling trout which were deposited at the Forest Home State Fish Hatchery near Redlands, California.  A flood destroyed the specimens on March 17, 1938.  Needham returned to the peninsula in l938 and captured 325 fingerlings.  These too died when the water-supply line became blocked at the Clackamas Station of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.  Next