Could You Accidentally Be Killing Steelhead?

Photo: Louis Cahill

Louis Cahill, over at Gink & Gasoline, just wrote up an interesting story about steelhead mortality. Now, his story is anecdotal (the information he shares was shared to him by a friend) but it passes the smell test.

It goes like this—is it possible to kill a steelhead without knowing you were the one who dealt the fish its final blow?

To understand how that’s possible, you need to hear the story Louis’s friend told him

Some scientists wanted to tag steelhead to track their movements, so they set out with fly rods to catch a few, insert the tags, and let them free. However, once they looked up the tag data, they noticed something alarming.

“Within two hours many of the fish they had tagged, and released in good health, were dead,” Cahill wrote. “They collected the fish and performed autopsies to determine what had gone wrong. In every case the cause of death was head trauma. It turns out that ‘steelhead’ is a misnomer. The fish’s head is, in fact, its most vulnerable spot.”

Head trauma, as Louis points out later on in the story, is possible if the steelhead is landed in shallow water, where it has the chance to thrash around and knock its head on rocks. Without the depth and rush of water to contain the movements, even if the steelhead is in a net, it can still knock its head on rocks and potentially cause brain damage.

There’s a bit more to it than I’ve described here, so it’s worth reading all of Louis’s story, which you can do here.