Logging Lake is stuffed with invasive lake trout . . .
Glacier National Park’s Logging Lake is brimming with non-native lake trout, biologists have found. In 2015, biologists from the U.S. Geological survey netted 2,158 lake trout from the remote North Fork water.
“That’s a lot of fish,” Vin D’Angelo, fisheries biologist with the USGS said.
Initial netting last spring brought worries that the entire lake was full of lake trout and little else. They only caught 10 suckers, but hundreds of lake trout. The lake trout are killed and their air bladders are punctured so they sink back to the bottom of the lake, which avoids any conflict with bears and other scavengers.
But fall netting caught 864 suckers, D’Angelo noted. The idea isn’t to catch suckers, which are a bait fish, he noted, but at least biologists know they’re in the lake in healthy numbers. In fact, Logging Lake has turned out to be a fairly diverse body of water compared to other North Fork lakes. In addition to suckers species, it has a healthy population of westslope cutthroat trout, northern pike minnows and mountain whitefish. The lake trout don’t eat many cutts, because lake trout generally live in water that’s 50 to 70 feet deep, while cutts are a surface feeding fish.