Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
The global rainbow invasion and a synthetic paradox
I’ve pursued and caught rainbow trout in many places, some of them unlikely. I caught hundreds in South Africa when I was based there. Here in the United States, I’ve had them hit my flies and brought them to my net in Texas and Oklahoma. I’ve done the same in the mountain states of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, states that, at least in the popular imagination, are more associated with trout and rainbow in particular.
I also managed to land one magnificent rainbow in Alaska during a reporting trip there in 2008. Of the hundreds of rainbow trout that I have caught, that one stands out because it was the only one that was swimming where it belonged.
(Photo: Author Anders Halverson details the rainbow trout’s unnatural recent history. Photo credit: Ginna J. Halverson)
The improbable history of the rainbow’s global conquest is detailed in “An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World,” by Anders Halverson, a journalist, angler and scientist. You can see my interview with him about the book here.
