Ever Seen A Blue Trout

One fish, two fish, wanna see a blue fish?
Great Falls Tribune - Great Falls, Mont.
Author: MICHAEL BABCOCK
Date: May 19, 2011

There are blue fin tuna and blue catfish and just plain blue fish ? a salt water variety ? but have you ever seen a blue trout?

Turns out they are rare, but not that rare.

Roland Nello Micheletti of Black Eagle is fascinated by the blue trout that he found last fall in the show pond at Giant Springs Fish Hatchery in Great Falls. He has photographed them and handed out more than 200 pictures to people.

"Anything to promote Giant Springs," Micheletti said. "When we were kids we had a lot of great times down there."

Micheletti learned of the blue trout while chatting with one of the hatchery workers.

"I said the albino must be one of the rarest and he said 'no, the blue trout is the rarest,' Micheletti recalled. "I had never seen one.

"Then last summer I took a cousin down to look at the fish and the blue trout just came up and I said this is the one FWP has been talking about."

"They definitely are a blue shade," said Bruce Chaney, manager of the Giant Springs Fish Hatchery. "It is a genetic aberration. It is just that their pigmentation is a different color than what a normal rainbow would be. They are kind of like an albino but instead of yellow they are blue."

Chaney said the blue trout is rare but not real rare.

The blue trout are in the "show pond" where visitors can watch the trout, according to Chaney.

"We always get some," Chaney said. "I am sure there are some out in our raceways right now.

"They grow just like a normal rainbow trout," Chaney said. "When we do see something like that or the albino we try to separate them and raise them large enough to put out in the show pond with the bigger fish ? just something for people to see."

Chaney said he has never seen a blue trout get as large as a normal rainbow trout.

"It seems like most get to be a pound or two pounds at the biggest," he said.

Chaney said blue trout like albino trout are unlikely to survive long in the wild.

"If you come upon one in the wild, there is nothing wrong with them, they just have different pigmentation. But you probably wouldn't see one in the wild. Just like the albino, because of their coloration, they are an attraction to other predators who key right in on them."

p>Fisheries people raise between 650,000 to 700,000 trout each year at the Giant Springs Fish Hatchery. The fish come to the hatchery in the "eye" stage, in which only an eye is visible in the egg.

"We get eggs shipped in the eye stage and it takes about 10 days for them to hatch," Chaney said. "We raise them up to whatever size the biologists request.

The hatchery receives rainbows from a brood hatchery at Arlee north of Missoula and from the federal fish hatchery at Ennis.

"We plant these where ever we need rainbows," Chaney said. "Most of what we plant here stays in northcentral Montana.

The hatchery raises fish year round: They receive eggs in the spring and then again in late summer. They raise the largest numbers of fish in November, December and January and plant them in the spring.

"We are just getting going on planting right now," Chaney said. "We begin with the weather being good in about mid-April and go all the way through mid-October.

Micheletti has chats frequently with FWP Administrative Assistant Laura Doughty about the blue trout.

"He is really interested in them," she said. "He has visited a lot about them. I think people get interested in our hatchery system when they go to that show pond by the spring where they can feed the fish."