The popular sporting trout, the hybrid tiger trout, is named not because of the tiger-like coloring and zigzag pattern of interlocking markings from head to tail, as illustrated. The tiger is an artificial insemination hybrid crossbreed species from female brown trout eggs fertilized by male brook trout sperm, or milt. The purpose of crossbreeding is to combine the furious bait-taking habit of the brook trout with the fighting hooked fury of the deep-water diving brown trout.
As a sterile hybrid, like the mule offspring of a donkey and a horse, the tiger trout cannot reproduce itself. Consequently, it dictates all its energy to feed and rapidly grow from stocking size to a potential 20-pound trophy within a few years. It is known to be piscivorous (fish-eating) and a good control against unwanted bait populations. It also can be tightly controlled in population as a sterile species.
Tiger trout are produced and stocked locally by the Sandwich State Fish Hatchery just across the Sagamore Bridge in Cape Cod. The tiger trout is stocked in ponds in Rochester, as well as in Plymouth. The Sandwich Hatchery is also open seven days a week, from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm for visitors to view and feed the fish. Similarly, the Berkshire Hatchery, near my previous residence in Western Massachusetts, annually invited visits from groups of underprivileged inner city youth from New York City for overnight camping and environmental education. Each youngster was given fly fishing lessons in our stocked pond. Catching a tiger trout for a youngster was always a trophy prize, but pulling it in was somewhat like having a tiger by the tail.
Wherever they are stocked today, the performance of the tiger trout lives up to its name. It is also increasing in numbers because conservation-minded sportsman use barbless hooks for catch and release so they can grow bigger to be caught again. Hopefully this hatchery-grown hybrid species will continue on to be nationally rated in what I would call the ‘Anglers Hall of Fame’. It might rank with the colorful western cutthroat trout that lights and livens up the waters of glacial melts that run like a river through the Rocky Mountains of the Continental Divide Another is the acrobatic surface jumping of the colorful rainbow trout that, in autumn, can annually migrate downriver to the sea and change color to a salty metallic shade with a name change to steelhead trout. And last, but not least, is the Atlantic salmon that became king of the fighting fish kingdom in both Britain and Scotland since the eighteenth century literary publication of The Complete Anglerby father of all angling culture, Izaak Walton, and is now enthroned on both sides of the pond. With this article and drawing, I would nominate the tiger trout as a possible member of this distinctive sporting aristocracy.
By George B. Emmons
