Fish of the National Parks
Meet the 8 fish we've written up, like the Brook trout, and the national parks where you'll find them.
-
Fish Brook trout
Salvelinus fontinalis
A small, wormy-patterned native fish with red spots ringed in blue, the only trout that truly belongs in the cold high streams of the Smokies and Shenandoah.
-
Fish Bull trout
Salvelinus confluentus
A char, not a true trout, that needs the coldest, cleanest water in the mountains, so finding one is itself a kind of water-quality report.
-
Fish Chinook salmon
Oncorhynchus tshawytscha
The biggest Pacific salmon, called king salmon, whose Elwha River run climbed back over a hundred-year-old dam site within a few years of its removal.
-
Fish Coho salmon
Oncorhynchus kisutch
A silver ocean salmon that comes home each winter to the small creeks under the redwoods, turning brick-red and hook-jawed to spawn once and die.
-
Fish Devils Hole pupfish
Cyprinodon diabolis
A tiny blue fish that lives in one warm, deep desert pool at Death Valley and nowhere else on Earth, one of the rarest fish in the world.
-
Fish Kokanee salmon
Oncorhynchus nerka
A landlocked sockeye salmon that spends its whole life inside Crater Lake, turning bright red to spawn without ever swimming a mile toward the ocean.
-
Fish Steelhead
Oncorhynchus mykiss
A rainbow trout that swims to the ocean and back, the one salmon-family fish here that can spawn more than once instead of dying after a single trip.
-
Fish Yellowstone cutthroat trout
Oncorhynchus clarkii bouvieri
A native trout with a red-orange slash under its jaw, the fish that fed the whole web of life around Yellowstone Lake for thousands of years.