A Brief History of Salmon and Trout Transplants to New Environments: Invited Guests, Unwanted Pests, and Cherised Jewels

Over their evolutionary history, salmonid fishes have repeatedly colonized and been driven from their native habitats by the retreats and advances of glaciers.  More recently, their ranges have been greatly modified by transplants of fish within and especially outside their native ranges; non-native populations are now established in all continents except Antarctica.  Such transplants were common practice from the late 1800s to the present but the motivations behind the efforts and attitudes towards the fishes in question have changed over the decades.  In this presentation we will briefly review some of these periods of time, including the efforts to “acclimatize” salmonids to new habitats, the subsequent concerns that they were adversely affecting native salmonid or non-salmonid fishes, and the recent efforts to reintroduce populations to areas from which they were extirpated as part of conservation strategies.  We will then conclude with comments on the potential offered by such transplants for studying the behavior and ecology of salmonids, some of the pitfalls in such work, and the challenges that past and present transplants pose for conservation and management.