Are lake- and brook trout technically trout or char?
Genuine question…
Both are members of the Char family
And rainbow trout are salmon.
But realize "trout" is a very generic word (generic in the sense it is a relatively non-technical word) and most lump char under the trout umbrella.
Had the incredible good fortune to have a 1 on 1 with the now retired AK char biologist some time back. For many hours he showed me his career output, mostly on Dolly Varden and arctic char. He tagged fish in NW AK and in no time they had traveled to Russia.
John mentioned Dolly Varden and bull trout being split some time back. It is true, but the truly interesting part to me is how it was done. The archetypal organism usually gets to keep the original name. Char caught up and down the coast of the PNW were called Dolly Varden (but only fairly recently, just after our Civil War) by all. Not long ago they decided there are two species involved and let the original fish called Dollies change their name to bull trout. The new species kept the old species name. Please excuse the stretch there... pre 1870s they were called something, but not Dollies because Dolly Varden had not had her moment in the limelight, yet.
Then they found a different characteristic, (number of gill rackers) in two fish formerly called Dollies. So Arctic char came into being. They have incredibly different life histories and many are thinking there are at least a couple new species of char up here.
Dollies mostly live in lakes and over-winter in streams while arctic char live in rivers and over-winter in lakes. They also have different numbers of gill rakers. Dollies typically (not always) run to saltwater for a brief while in the spring and return with the salmon. But they do not return to their natal stream until they are ready to spawn. They seem to select the overwintering streams randomly until the spawning urge hits them.
Arctic char tend to stay in their natal streams all their lives, moving between summers in moving water and winters in lakes,
Now come a couple wild anomalies: in some NW AK systems only the dolly females go to salt... almost. at about 5" or so the females all descend to salt and spend enough time to come back big and beautiful and proceed to spawn with dwarf males a tiny fraction of their size. However, a small number of stunted males go with the girls to salt and return as robust, 'roided, redd riders every bit as big as the returning chubby chicks. So when you see the grip and grins with a monster char with a huge kype, realize that fish had to run to salt to keep from getting sand flipped in his face!
Studies on Atlantic salmon have shown a serious percentage of the spawning is done by jacks.
The retired char fellow believes there are more species of Dolly to pare off the current lines.
Anomaly number 2: A very long time ago the taimen (Hucho taimen) was split from the Salmonid line and moved off but remained in the Salmonid Family. Shortly thereafter a different group moved off the salmonid line and into its own family. That would be pike, pickerel, and musky. They maintain the adipose fin and are not really that different from salmonids. Every time a hooked lake trout breaks the surface it looks just like a pike. The color match is amazing. Now they know our serious pike problem here in SC AK is worse than thought. The commercial set netters in Cook Inlet have been catching pike in Cook Inlet. And through testing otoliths can tell if the pike they are looking at came from salt water or was brought there like the first ones that got here.
