A Michigan Psychologist Finds Shock Treatments Teach Hatchery Trout To Become Smarter Fish

With trout seasons getting under way over much of the country, an annual complaint is being heard—the fish are too hard to catch. Actually, this is the perennial cry of the novice, for no fish is more gullible than a freshly stocked trout. It will come as a cruel shock to the fishless to learn, therefore, that a move is on to make newly planted trout smarter.

For years most states have stocked their streams with trout of legal size but unavoidably lacking in the instinctive wariness of their wild brethren. Such fish seldom survive the season to spawn again and bolster the ever-dwindling supply of native trout. Now a man in Michigan is out to change this situation.

Knowing that his state was spending a whopping $400,000 a year to dump more than a million naive trout in its streams (far too many of which would go to herons, mink and other natural predators), Joe Bingham, a clinical psychologist, persuaded the Michigan Department of Conservation to finance a unique experiment: the education of hatchery trout to fear man and nature's enemies.

A wild trout, he reasoned, knows how to take care of itself. It learns in the school of hard knocks and close calls. Suppose hatcheries were turned into places where life for trout was real and earnest, and caution—not a wild dash for the feed bucket—the goal? The result should be suspicious, skittish trout that would be a better sporting proposition for the angler. And those not fooled by the fisherman's lures might well live to spawn another day in secluded feeder wilderness streams.

TROUT CAME LIKE CHICKENS

With Assistant Harvey Adelman, who was to work with him, Joe Bingham began studying his innocent charges. He noted that when hatchery workers approached the ponds with feed pails the trout came like flocks of chickens. If he stood on a bank and tossed sticks or pebbles to them, they'd rise to strike before the debris hit the water and would seize the stuff without appraising it.

In one pond a hatchery workman reported seeing a mink sneak in looking for a meal of plump trout. Instead of showing fear, the trout rushed naively en masse at the mink, looking for a handout.

Bingham deduced that the first thing these fish must be taught was to feed deep. If they could be made shy of the surface, he reasoned, they'd not be easily spotted or caught by predators, nor would they be so quick to seize a fly.

HOW TROUT WERE EDUCATED

"Classes" were launched through long feeding tubes which thrust down to the bottom of the ponds. Daily the trout were schooled in taking their livelihood from the bottom. Never did a trout have an opportunity to associate the food it ate with man. Whenever an individual fish decided to come up to the surface for a look around it was given a sharp reminder, in the form of an electric shock automatically passed out by a special device rigged for the purpose, that this was no place for a trout with longevity in mind to be showing itself.