Reported First by Penn Live: Golden rainbow trout will attract a lot of attention on Saturday, the first day of the trout fishing season, but there’s an even rarer genetic mutation in trout swimming in just a handful of spots in Pennsylvania. As a matter of fact, no angler is likely to encounter a blue trout without a visit to a display pond at one of the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission’s hatcheries.
About half of the commission’s eight trout hatcheries have display ponds open to the public. The Huntsdale hatchery, along Pine Road a short distance east of Rt. 233 in Cumberland County, has several in its display ponds, with visiting hours of 8 a.m.-3:30 p.m. daily.
Some of them are reasonably large trout, but none come close to the 21-pounder known as “Big Blue” that lived at the now-closed Big Spring hatchery near Newville in the late 1990s.
In a 1997 article in “Pennsylvania Angler & Boater” magazine, Art Michaels described the blue trout as “azure-blue on the top and sides, fading to white on the bottom.”
Terry Farner, then-manager at Big Spring, said the blue mutation occurred in only 30 or so rainbow trout among the 4 million trout eggs spawned at the hatchery each year.
Although the mutation also occurs in hatchery-reared brown trout, most often it’s found in rainbow trout.
James Wright, a Penn State geneticist, speculated that the blue arises from a mutation that causes a deficiency in the fish’s thyroid, which produces hormones that affect the fish’s coloring.
Farner told Michaels that the blue trout were less robust than other rainbow trout.
“We separate them early on from the other trout because they’re weaker fish, and we don’t stock them,” he said. “Unless they are set aside, during the first year the other fish usually eat them or they succumb to the rigors of the hatchery’s high-density environmental conditions.”
Tom Cochran, fish production manager for the commission, said hatchery workers continue to try to pull the blue trout out of the general population, but in extremely rare instances anglers may encounter one in the wild because “a few sneak through the cracks, get out there and get stocked.”
He said the commission doesn’t attempt to breed blue trout and hasn’t experimented with the possibilities, particularly with its hatcheries currently running at capacity.
In that respect, the blue trout differs considerably from the golden trout, which is a genetically modified trout, strains of which the commission maintains and breeds for stocking.
The golden trout originated in a single, partly gold rainbow trout discovered in a hatchery of the West Virginia Conservation Department in 1954. By 1963 the West Virginia hatcheries had developed the strain into the “West Virginia Centennial Golden Trout.”
The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission began producing and stocking a gold-colored palomino trout in 1967, but has since moved to a different, more brilliantly gold strain of rainbow.
A different blue strain, described as “cobalt blue on its back, lighter on the undersides and silvery on the belly,” was found in a French fish farm in 2005. That strain reportedly is capable of breeding.
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