I just discovered a new blog that has a terrific introduction to the history of Rainbow Trout on the West Coast.

There's a new book called An Entirely Synthetic Fish about the introduction of Rainbow Trout into our waterways, that documents some of the ways that these fish were introduced by very novel means.

It turns out that in the 1950s apparently they decided that dropping trout from the sky into California lakes was a good idea.

"In one of the more surreal sections of the book, Halverson describes
the origins of aerial fish-stocking missions, as surplus World War II
planes and demobilised pilots were successfully redeployed in the 1950s
to introduce the rainbow trout to previously fishless lakes, high in
the California mountains. Even as you anticipate the disastrous
ecological consequences, it’s hard not to be amazed by the gung-ho
ingenuity of former crop duster and California Department of Fish and Game pilot Al Reese:

First, Reese tried freezing the fish in ice blocks and
parachuting them in ice cream containers. Both of these techniques,
though, proved dangerous and difficult. And so, one day, Reese and his
assistants tried a simpler technique. They put fifty trout and some
water into a five-gallon can and threw it out the window toward a
hatchery pond about 350 feet below. They missed, and the can bounced
along the rocks nearby instead. But when observers recovered the
twisted metal debris, they found sixteen fish still swimming in the
small amount of water that remained.

Ultimately, Reese and the team ditched the barrels altogether in
favour of releasing fish that would hit the water “with a vertical
speed of about thirty miles per hour,” in a scene described by
observers as “a cloud of mist that suddenly appeared behind the plane,
full of the barely distinguishable dark shapes of small fish.”

Read the rest here: The Amazing Allegorical Synthetic Fish