For thousands of years, Lahontan cutthroat trout swam in the expansive waters of Lake Tahoe.
But by 1938, the fish — affected by European settlers’ actions in the Tahoe Basin by such as logging, overfishing, construction of dams and water diversions, and the introduction of non-native species — disappeared.
European settlers offset the lack of large fish by stocking Lake Tahoe with non-native species but for decades, the lake was devoid of Lahontan cutthroat trout.
A Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW) project is changing that.
Biologists studied non-native Rainbow trout — similar in many ways to Lahontan cutthroat trout — to understand their spawning patterns in Lake Tahoe. What they saw gave them hope that a self-sustaining population of Lahontan cutthroat trout could return to the lake in a limited capacity, and they began a multiyear reintroduction and monitoring effort. This year, Lahontan cutthroat were documented exhibiting spawning behavior in a tributary of the lake — the first unassisted attempt in Lake Tahoe in nearly 90 years, according to state biologists.