In their respected Freshwater Fishes of Canada, Scott and Crossman report that, "In a very thorough study of brook trout in Ontario, Ricker provided a review of the organisms eaten. The list of organisms is astonishing and suggest brook trout will eat any living creature its mouth can accommodate: worms, leeches, crustaceans, aquatic insects (over 80 genera eaten), terrestrial insects (over 30 families), spiders, mollusks, a number of fish species (including young speckled trout), frogs, salamanders, and a snake."
Coupled with their nonselective taste buds, aurora trout have appetites like hyperactive teenagers. When water temperatures are in the optimal range (55 degrees to 58 degrees) for growth, the fish will eat half their body weight in minnows each week. That means a chunky two-pound aurora will chow down a pound of minnows in seven or fewer days. Little wonder that the biggest aurora trout caught in Ontario weighed 6.75-pounds and was brought to the net, not by some Barishnikov waving a fly-rod, but by a 10 year-old angler dragging a spinner rig and worm during the middle of summer. The trout was 20.25-inches long with a 13.5-inch girth. Young Kyle Maki caught his spotless trophy on August 1, 1997 in the Nayowin River, about 100 miles southwest of Kirkland Lake.
Aurora trout share another trait, albeit an unfortunate one, with brook trout. They have incredibly short life spans. A 5-year-old aurora trout is a grand daddy. A 6-, 7-, or 8-year old fish is a Methuselah.
When you think about it, big, beautiful, fast growing, short lived, aggressive, ever hungry, easy to catch, and easier to please are hardly conditions conducive to fish population explosions. Factor in where the auroras live--downwind of the giant International Nickel and Falconbridge Nickel smelters in Sudbury, Ontario, and it spells double trouble for the trout.
By the early 1960s, so much acid had spewed out of the smoke stacks and rained down on Whirligig and Little Whitepine lakes as well as on 20,000 other bodies of water in the area that they were turned into fishless chemical graveyards. Only a last-ditched, heroic captive-breeding program saved the aurora trout from extinction. They were declared an endangered species in 1987.
But the news isn't all bad.
Ontario Natural Resources staff carefully fertilized the eggs from nine wild aurora trout, and nurtured the offspring. Today they maintain a successful brood stock production program at the Hills Lake Hatchery in Earlton, Ontario. Also, an aurora trout refuge in Alexander, Southeast Campcot, and Northeast Campcot lakes in the event of a disaster at the hatchery.
Some good news also has come from the home front. Whirligig and Little Whitepine are the two picture-postcard kettle lakes now lie within the Lady-Evelyn Smoothwater Wilderness Provincial Park. In 1989, Ontario Natural Resources biologists and fisheries scientists at Laurentian University in Sudbury spearheaded a "whole-lake liming" recovery project. Using helicopters to ferry in massive amounts of crushed and powdered limestone, they attempted to change the water chemistry of the lakes, neutralize and reverse the effects of acid rain, and reestablish naturally reproducing populations of aurora trout.
