Gimmick Trout : Fisherman Get Hooked on Beauty, but Not Bite

The West Virginia Centennial Trout, a pure-gold beauty prone to sunburn, continues to irk and entice fishermen 31 years after a hatchery worker spotted the first one sparkling in the water.

Then and now, the state proclaims the golden trout is no flash in the pan as a tourism draw and game fish.

“Gimmick fish,” counter hatchery workers where the golden is raised.

The golden does not breed in the wild, does not occur in the wild, and is expected to live in West Virginia’s streams only long enough to get caught. Its pale body glows like a beacon to fishermen, but it usually refuses to bite.

A Saving Grace

Some anglers say the golden is half-blind. Others say its flesh tastes different from its brother, the rainbow trout.

It has a saving grace. It is very, very pretty.

And no matter what you say about the neon golden, you can only say it in West Virginia. The fish is nowhere else.

“It’s an oddity,” says Don Phares, head of the Department of Natural Resources cold water fish program. “Nobody else has these.”

Man-Made Trout

There is a gold trout that occurs naturally in the western United States. But only in West Virginia is there this man-made trout, looking for all the world like a slender goldfish.

The golden was first stocked in 1963 during West Virginia’s centennial celebration. Even the gimmick fish had a gimmick. The goldens were weighted down with gold tags for fishermen to keep and remember the centennial by, and numbered red tags to be used in a prize drawing.

“West Virginia is more or less the laughingstock of the fishing industry for stocking golden trout,” says hatchery worker Bob Livingston. “It’s a gimmick.”

A gimmick isn’t all bad, Phares says.

Tourist Attraction

“It tends to attract tourists,” he says. “One of the major sports magazines will write an article on the golden trout about every year, and it always draws interest.”

Phares says quite a few fishermen try to snare one of the several thousand goldens released in West Virginia’s mountain streams each year.

Pennsylvania had expressed an interest in raising goldens, but West Virginia forbids making these fish or their eggs available to anyone else. Instead, Pennsylvania has come up with the “Palomino,” a splotchy trout West Virginians think is not nearly as pretty.

Livingston earns his money stocking trout for the Petersburg hatchery, one of the only two places where the state raises the golden. Fishermen follow behind his stocking truck, hoping for an easy catch of the travel-stunned fish.

Other Fish to Catch

“Any goldens?” one truck follower asked during a recent foray.

No, Livingston replied.

“Good,” the truck follower said, heading off in pursuit of brooks and browns.

True fishers of trout don’t like the golden, Livingston says. Petersburg hatchery manager Rick Baccus agrees.

The problem with these golden fish is that in shallow water they shine like a glow-in-the-dark poster under black light. Because hatchery fish tend to school, where there’s a golden, there’s a passel of rainbows, browns and brooks.

“It came to the point four years ago where we eliminated stocking them in small streams. It was just too easy,” Baccus says.

Sit in Water and Gloat

Trout junkie Ernest Nester prefers not to mess with the golden.

“I have never caught many--maybe a grand total of five,” Nester says.

Nester, a Trout Unlimited member from Montgomery, prefers casting in streams off the beaten path, not regularly stocked, where the trout are wily and native. Goldens, on the other hand, run in put-and-take waters stocked for the trout fishing business.

And Nester says the goldens refuse to take even his most carefully presented fly.

“I found them difficult to catch,” he says. “I have suspected their eyesight isn’t all that good and they have trouble seeing the fly.”

And, Nester says, “the golden trout are not as spooky as the other hatchery trout,” meaning they sit in the water and gloat at fishermen above. Phares says he thinks the golden is aware of its high visibility and is wary of any food coming from above.

Related to Rainbow Trout

So who likes the golden?

“Politicians,” Baccus says.

Phares says the golden is actually still popular with fishermen. “People spend a considerable amount of time trying to catch the golden.”

All of West Virginia’s goldens are descendants of a mottled female rainbow trout that appeared in the spring of 1955 at the Petersburg State Trout Hatchery.

Hatchery manager Vincent Evans dubbed the yellow-splotched fish “Little Camouflage.” By fall, the mottling had turned to a wide gold band encircling the middle of the 14-inch fish like a saddle.

In October, 1956, about 900 eggs from “Little Camouflage” were fertilized with milt from a regular rainbow trout. The eggs were mixed with thousands of others from hatchery rainbows and reared into fingerlings. None of the fish showed any trace of gold.

Turned Solid Gold

That winter, about 500,000 fingerlings were transferred to the Spring Run hatchery, where Evans also had moved. In February, Evans noticed a touch of pale yellow on some of his fish. Within a few weeks, nearly 300 of them had turned solid gold.

It took several years of genetic study and selective breeding to bring the goldens up to the size and vigor of their rainbow ancestors. A Pennsylvania scientist eventually concluded that the goldens were merely rainbows without melanin, a skin pigment common to most animals.

Goldens do not breed in the wild, since they, like their rainbow brothers, spawn in the fall and their small fry fall prey to the harsh winter.

About 8% of the trout stocked in West Virginia are goldens, Phares says. Another 1% are a brown-brook hybrid called “tigers,” and they, too, are meant to live only long enough to be caught.