Call me slow, call me what you will, but I've always wondered how lakes get stocked with fish. Now that I've seen it, I can't un-see it, and that's not a bad thing because it really is interesting and pretty mesmerizing.

Over the weekend, Colorado Parks and Wildlife released about 95,000 fish into various lakes in the Colorado wilderness. 73 different lakes to be exact.

The fish are currently very small, around 1 inch, and will take approximately two years to mature to around 10 inches and get to the size where they can be caught.

CPWP Assistant Aquatics Section Manager Josh Nehring said:

Most of these remote high mountain lakes do not have the proper habitat and conditions to allow for natural reproduction. Over the course of just a couple of weeks, CPW stocks hundreds of lakes each year using this method.

Back in the day, the lakes would get stocked by people carrying the fish in jars on horseback to the lakes to fill them up. This modern way is much more efficient and much cooler to watch.


Pretty neat right? The goal is, by the end of summer, to have stocked 240 lakes with around 275,000 fish. That was the second of three big dumps scheduled so far. Big shout out to Colorado Parks and Wildlife for not only all that they do for us and our great outdoors, but for showing us and teaching us some pretty neat stuff like this.

 

Colorado's Wild Big Game Populations

 

Colorado's Wild Big Game Populations

 

 

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