German brown vs. Loch Leven

[catchinon]

I dearly love to catch brown trout. My fishing roots go back to my grandfather. I remember him calling them Loch Levens but never knew exactly what that meant. So here's the skinny from a post on a fly fishing board.

"Brown trout in driftless area streams have two separate blood lines. Most people that think of browns they think of German Browns right away. There was another type of brown brought across. It is called the Lock Leven brown. Lock Leven means "Lock Eleven" and is a brown of Scottish heritage. Both trout species were brought over in the holds of ships by early settlers.

The way to tell the 2 breeds apart before they became intermingle was the different spot patterns. German browns typically have reds spots intermingled with the other spots. Loch Leven browns have no red spot. The real way to tell them apart definitely is to look to see if they are wearing leder hosen or kilts"
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[dubob]

[quote catchinon]The real way to tell them apart definitely is to look to see if they are wearing leder hosen or kilts"[/quote][font "Comic Sans MS"][#800000][size 3]That's how I tell them apart.[/size][/#800000][/font]
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[SkunkedAgain]

Interesting, so I thought the browns without red spots was just because they were older/bigger fish... Maybe they were levens???? Later J
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[TubeDude]

"The real way to tell them apart definitely is to look to see if they are wearing leder hosen or kilts"

[#0000FF]And if you want to know the gender...pull down their genes.[/#0000FF]
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[Cowboypirate]

I learned somthing new again today. Thanks. But I like Tubedudes method better
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[doggonefishin]

If you really want to blow your mind, take a look at this book.

https://www.amazon.com/Trout-World-reiss...363&sr=8-1


It includes descriptions and paintings of many of the brown trout subspecies in Europe. Included are fish that are called "marmorated", and look like tiger trout (but are decidely not and are a fertile viable subspecies), Zebree patterns which are a sort of barring or striping, and even a finespotted variety that looks most like a Snake River finespotted cutthroat trout, but is not. It comes from Norway. These and many more are all in the species called brown trout. (Salmo trutta) Pretty cool stuff.


While it is true that the German and Scottish stocks had different spotting tendencies, there has been so much interbreeding since that I am skeptical that we could catch any brown nowadays in our fisheries that is very pure. That said, there is incredible spotting variety in the fish we catch. Below are a series of 3 brown trout I caught in short succession a couple years ago. They all came from the same run so local habitat was not different. The first has only a couple of red spots and very few brown ones. The second is the "typical" pattern, and the third shows very small faint red spots, which are numerous and rather pale small brown ones.

These all come from the same genetics but show the impressive variety that is possible.
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[fast_randy]

Interesting post. I have always loved German Browns. That's what my dad called them and I have caught hundreds of rainbow, Brookes and Natives, or cutthroat, but only like 20 Brown's my whole life. 62 years of trout fishing.
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