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3. Check out this very unusual trout

I have a new Facebook friend and he sent me this picture. It looks like a cross between a Rocky Mountain whitefish and a brown trout. It is not photoshopped.

http://www.balkan-trout.com/slike/studied_neretva_1.jpg

Matt,
Pretty cool fish. The photo got me curious so I googled Neretva trout. Apparently quite a bit of flyfishing for it in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Found some more pictures from the University of Toronto http://individual.utoronto.ca/manuesteve/UTsoftmouth.html as well as some spawning footage on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7MPHM7hzCs. Also found a paper on the Neretva River and it's fish here http://www.fao.org/docrep/012/i1373e/i1373e03.pdf.
Interesting trout and river, thanks for posting it.
Mark

Wow! Just added that to my fish wish list.

Guys, check out James Prosek's Trout of the World. He covers just about every species and subspecies of salmonids worldwide, and I remember he's got a pretty good discussion of Balkan species in there, which are quite diverse.

Jonathon

Jonathan,

Another good book is Robert Behnke's "Trout and Salmon of North America" illustrated by Joseph Tomelleri. While it only covers North America I don't think Behnke missed much. Good descriptions as well as the biology and ecology of trout.

Mark, I am familiar with that one too. Joseph Tomelleri is also an amazing fish artist (I have his Fishes of the Central United States, tour de force on the sunfish!), and the contrast in the two styles is interesting - Prosek uses watercolors while Tomelleri uses colored pencils, yet both create drawings/paintings of fishes that I have actually seen and caught on numerous occasions. So, I can guess that the species I don't know are represented accurately!

Prosek has also done his homework and corresponded with Behnke and other salmonid experts...though not to the degree that Behnke and his colleagues have! But he does back up his "coffee-table trout books" with some interesting knowledge.

Jonathon

Brown trout evolved in eastern Eurasia, so there's diversity there. Our stocks of browns are derived from just two varieties. Likely the "odd" mouth of obtusirostris (and lenok) are convergent with whitefish (adaptations to environmental circumstances and not directly related). Here's the trunk page from a site Mark provided, showing salmonid diversity:

http://individual.utoronto.ca/manuesteve/UTphylogeny.html

Click on S. akairos! Pretty cool. (I almost ended up in Morocco, instead of the Philippines.)