Consider the Lake Trout. Or, on Second Thought, Screw 'Em.

David Foster Wallace may have felt reservations about whether it was all right for humans to boil crustaceans alive for our gustatory pleasure… but would he have felt similarly reluctant to bash the head of an invasive fish against a boat railing? Would the famously compassionate writer have been able to stomach the extermination of an entire population of trout?

Would he have objected to the ruthlessness of the project, or would it have been the mode of extirpation that bothered him: the gillnets draped beneath the surface of Yellowstone Lake like invisible, lethal cobwebs, ensnaring and suffocating all piscine comers? Could any method of slaughter mollify the sensitive, thoughtful DFW?

Perhaps not. Good thing I'm a jerk.

***

Maybe we all possess some latent, Wallacean compassion within our souls… but lake trout - the invasive species that is threatening Yellowstone National Park's ecosystem, and that I have been contracted to eliminate - definitely don’t activate that warmth within me.

An evil, invasive lake trout disgorges a juvenile native cutthroat trout. I see this image in my nightmares.

Lake trout look, first, like the enemy: torpedo-shaped body and elongated, toothy jaws; sinister black mottling that must make them impossible for their hapless prey to detect; and even – though I must be imagining this – a certain willful malignancy in their soulless eyes. (Anthropomorphizing nature is typically a marker of authorial weakness, one which Ed Abbey in particular hates, but I swear that in this case it's applicable and valid. Really.)

The cutthroat trout, the good guys, on the other hand, look as virtuous as the lakers do evil. The cutts are beautiful fish, ranging in coloration from pale gold to pink to deep red, constellations of black spots along their flanks, and their faces possess the same hollow, dopey, good-natured, preyed-upon vacuousness as sheep. The point is, it’s easy to choose sides.

A cutthroat trout... ain't he adorable? Dontcha just want to kiss him? Me too.

Malevolent countenances aside, the lake trout are horrifically destructive. Introduced by fishermen (short-sighted bastards) in the mid-‘90’s, their population has metastasized explosively, so much so that the National Parks Service has managed to remove 70,000 (!!!) this year without even making a dent in their numbers. Yellowstone Lake contains, in fact, one of the healthiest lake trout population in the country. If you’re ecologically inclined, they appear to be both a k- and r-selected species, meaning that they reproduce rapidly and live forever (up to fifty years, compared with eight or nine for the oldest cutthroat.)

Lake trout are voracious and efficient predators; our autopsies of them reveal bellies full of young cutthroat. Juvenile cutts, not incidentally, are very rare in Yellowstone Lake – while our nets pull up hundreds of fledgling lakers measuring 300 mm or less, the only cutthroat we see are the real ‘hogs,’ adult fish over 500 mm. This discrepancy troubled me for a while, until the blindingly obvious solution arrived: there are no young cutthroat, of course, because they get devoured; this creates an unsustainable population skewed toward the large and elderly. The situation’s like an aquatic Children of Men.

If the lake trout only ate the cutthroat, the ecosystem’s prospects would be grave, but not dire. Unfortunately, the lake trout exhibit another deleterious behavior: true to their name, they don’t leave the lake. While the cutthroat trout migrate up Yellowstone Lake’s many branching streams to spawn, the lakers do their baby-making in the deep waters of the lake itself. Problem is, many other species, from grizzlies to eagles, depend on the migrating cutthroat for food: once the fish leave the safety of the lake’s depths and enter shallow stream waters, they become accessible to these predators. If the lake trout supplant the cutthroat, this migratory buffet will vanish, exposing terrestrial species to starvation. To synopsize, and hopefully impart the gravity of the situation: if the lake trout aren’t removed, the entire ecosystem of the most iconic National Park in America is in jeopardy. And right now, the lake trout are winning.

***

Fellow intern Erinn Hasselgren holds up a record-setting 25.75 lb lake trout, the largest ever removed from Yellowstone Lake. Obviously this would never have been possible were it not for Erinn's sweet hat. Picture courtesy of gillnetting legend Adam Lohmeyer.

So, yeah, lake trout suck. And that’s why, whenever our nets drag a live, writhing laker to the surface, I have no trouble slamming the fish against the gunwale until it stops twitching. I’m not out to induce suffering, but I very much want the fish dead.

But truly I’m a scientist, not a slaughterer*. I’m part of a three-man reconnaissance crew currently conducting a Lake Trout Distribution Assessment, trying to figure out where the lake trout have established their strongholds**. Once we’ve identified a pocket of lakers, we send in the true grim reapers, the larger and better equipped factory ships capable of doing the really hardcore killing: a typical day for the Freedom, our fleet’s flagship, is eight hundred lake trout.

Fisheries technician Jason "Babyhands" Bunn strikes a familiar pose. Note the artfully placed "crotch trout." Picture courtesy of Alex Crouse.

***

I realize that slaughtering fish, and then handling their slimy, bloody, reeking corpses, is not everybody’s cup of tea; in fact, you may right now be wondering who in their right mind could enjoy a job that leaves one stinking like the dumpster behind your local Red Lobster***. But despite its gruesome, odiferous nature, I love this job. Or maybe I love this job not despite its gruesome, odiferous nature, but because of it: because it’s so far removed from Amherst’s sterility; because it activates and caters to some gloriously foul childhood instincts; because, after performing this job, I feel confident that nothing could ever disgust me again. I can now perform any nasty task without the slightest aversion; such imperviousness to all things gross is not only useful, but also, blessedly, pushes me further from a world of white collars and unstained shirts that I may never be ready to enter.

Familiar circumstances for me: holding a fish, and grinning like Ralphie Parker on Christmas morning.

***

Or maybe it’s being on the lake that I love: the enormous gray lake ringed by jagged mountains whose foothills plunge to touch the water’s edge, closing us off from the obnoxious, crowded world beyond. Setting nets and hauling in fish is fun, for sure, but my favorite part of each day is the time we spend with the throttle open: the skiff bouncing across the swell like a skipped stone, the roar of the engine reduced to gentle white noise by my earmuffs, an expectant parade of seagulls trailing us like acolytes. We’re on the edge of a storm front; the blunt heads of thunderclouds race us toward shore. Behind us a skein of rain turns the mountains gray, then blots them out; before us the sky is still blue and brilliant – it’s as though the storm is tethered to our stern, as though we’re dragging it behind us like a cape. Behind us, Yellowstone’s vast, forbidding backcountry turns black in the gathering dusk.

The unimaginatively named (but still beloved by me) Work Skiff 1 at rest on Peale Island, about a billion miles off the beaten path.

I look forward again – toward the clear sky, the gentle chop, the slab of fresh lake trout I can already smell sizzling in a pan (the wastivore's paradise!), and the warm sleeping bag. The wilderness can wait.

End.

*In addition to killing the fish, we also take reams of data – including our victims’ lengths, weights, sexes, degree of sexual maturity, and, most interestingly, age. The latter is calculated by removing from each fish its otolith, a pinhead-sized piece of bone, located approximately between the eyes, that can be used like the rings of a tree core.

**As the Distribution Assessment team, we often set our nets without knowing whether we’re above lake trout habitat; consequently we haul in a large number of cutthroat as bycatch, much to our chagrin. The lake trout favor deeper waters (>30 meters), while the cutts prefer shallow (<20 m); thus a net set in shallow water is almost assured to catch predominantly cutthroat. Still, the Powers That Be, in the name of complete scientific rigor, have instructed us to set nets in the shallows as well – despite our crew's protestations. Therefore we continue to catch cutthroats, the species we’re ostensibly protecting, in tragic numbers. Well, to make an omelet…

***If, when next I see/hug you, I still smell like a wad of sludge dredged up from the floor of the Long Island Sound, rest assured that, all odors to the contrary, I have showered in the last four months.