North Carolina’s state wildlife agency is stocking fewer trout this fall. That’s bad news for the hundreds of thousands of people who flock to western North Carolina to fish.
The North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission's decision to renovate its largest hatchery coincided with a summer of extreme heat and drought. Mountain fisheries supervisor Kin Hodges called this the “perfect storm”:
“It started off with a boom. Since then, it’s just been a long, slow, chronic, slow-motion fish kill all summer long,” Hodges said.
The state’s remaining hatchery lost most of its fish due to the heat and tree canopy loss from Hurricane Helene two years ago. The agency normally stocks “delayed harvest” waters in October. These zones allow anglers to catch and release from October to June, then harvest fish in the summer. This year, the NC WRC will wait until November to restock trout.
“We knew we’d have heat issues with Helene taking away shade and reducing water depths,” said David Deaton, state fish production supervisor with the NC WRC. “Then we were hit with a tough heatwave during a severe drought this summer that continues to impact our hatchery today. Every effort we have made to keep our stocking numbers up has been impacted by these unforeseen environmental factors.”
The agency started renovating its larger Bobby N. Setzer State Fish Hatchery in Brevard this year. The nearly 75-year-old facility was on its last legs, Hodges said. Setzer supplies about two-thirds of the state's publicly stocked trout, so this was already going to be a tough year.
“It’s been a brutal summer for these cold-water fish,” Deaton said. “The water temperatures coming into our hatchery have been at times, in the mid-to-high 70s. Trout cannot survive that temperature. They get stressed, become susceptible to disease and many die.”
North Carolina is near the southernmost range of trout territory in the Appalachian Mountains. These coldwater fish rely on low water temperatures to get enough oxygen and regulate their metabolism. But climate-fueled disasters and rising global temperatures are making it harder to stock this bespeckled critter.
Hurricane Helene transformed many of western North Carolina’s rivers. The flooding scoured riverbeds, creating wide, shallow stretches where the water heats faster. Landslides destroyed much of the tree canopy that trout relied on to keep their habitat cool during the summer.
This summer was also hot and dry. The months-long drought meant that rivers carried less water to absorb the sun’s radiation. Hodges said the water at their intake was too hot for trout to comfortably survive.
“That was happening day after day for weeks,” Hodges said. “And so when those conditions started, we started losing really high numbers of fish in the hatchery each day.”
Warm water means fewer, smaller trout, because the survivors aren’t eating very much. The average stock trout is about 10.5 inches. But some can grow over 14 inches if the hatcheries grow them long enough. Hodges called those big fish “crowd pleasers.”
“We just made the decision to try to keep the overall catch rates as high as we could at the expense of growing those larger fish,” Hodges said.
There won’t be many crowd pleasers in western North Carolina this fall. Ambitious anglers can still fish for wild trout at any of the designated state trout waters next month. A map of wild trout waters and catch-and-release zones is available on the NC WRC’s website.
