11:15 am - 12:00 pm
Update on Yellowstone's
Native Fish
Todd Koel
Yellowstone Center for Resources

Transcript

Todd Koel: I need you all to get into a sort of mind set of a fish if you will, and think about  maybe something a little different.  We've got some restraints here when compared to ungulates and other wildlife.  Fish are confined to waterways and they're living in a much different environment. So that makes quite a difference in the way we're working with them. Early on in the history of the park when the first surveys were done for fishes it was found that about 40% of our park waters were actually fishless shown here and outlined by these red arrows.  This was all originally fishless country in Yellowstone and it's significant because of  the changes that resulted from this in the late 1800's, early 1900's.

The other thing of course that fish are faced with are these things that we have in the park. Continental Divides, right?  I mean, that's something they just can't generally get across.  Not like the wolves and the bears we were just hearing a lot about. But there is a pretty neat place up just south of the park in the Bridger-Teton Wilderness Area,  it's called Two Ocean Pass.  This is a shot of that area up there.  It's actually where waters come together and split.  Some of the water runs down to the Pacific; some of the water runs down to the Atlantic.  And it's the area  where it's thought that  Yellowstone cutthroat trout got to Yellowstone Lake - over the Two Ocean Pass and then into Yellowstone Lake and  the Yellowstone River Drainage. So this is the historic distribution for Yellowstone cutthroat trout. This is it; this is where they are.  They're not elsewhere in our country or across North America.  This is pretty much it and the thing about Yellowstone cutthroat is that obviously our park lies right in the heart of this distribution and there are things going on out here as you can imagine, and you all read the paper and see the news. 

The habitat conditions out here are threatening these animals. The park is looked at as a place where things are secure and they're safe and doing fine. It's sort of considered a last strong hold, I guess, the terms you hear, that kind of thing. Of course there's other native fishes here as well in Yellowstone.  These are sort of the big four in terms of our native sport fish. Yellowstone cutthroat trout is one and there are two other subspecies, Westslope cutthroat, and Snake river finespotted cutthroat and we also have Arctic Grayling here that are  native to the park, in the Gibbon system now.  So Yellowstone is just one of  these, of several sport fishes that are now impacted by things that went on quite a long time ago.  And it was thought of that these fishless waters was something that maybe wasn't a good thing back way back when.  There was the worry that there weren't going to be enough fish in the park.  As numerous as the native fish were; it was a worry that they're weren't going to be enough for all the visitors that were going to come to Yellowstone after it was created.

So they started moving fish around. They started stocking fish in places where there were none in the past. And so now we're dealing with the impacts of that.  Because throughout the range of cutthroat in the west it's these introduced species that are the greatest or number one threat to their persistence, despite all the habitant issues that exist elsewhere.  It's still, when it come down to it, it's these non native fish introductions. That's the number one threat to the persistence of these native fish. And so across our great landscape here where we live and we call home and everything, we did a pretty good job of bringing in some non native fish early on. These are things like Brook trout, Brown trout,  Rainbow trout,  Lake trout; animals that didn't  previously exist here  early on and so we have them here now.  And of course it's provided for an incredible amount of enjoyment for anglers. No question about it. There's fish in places where before there were none and that's a neat thing.  That's okay. There's a lot of people that really enjoy that, that's great.

There's a more diverse fish community and I guess that to some degree that's okay but there's been consequences for this as well.  That's what we are dealing with now in the park.  I'm sure, you know, most folks in this room have heard about the lake trout introduction to Yellowstone Lake and the fact that they consume Cutthroat trout. And what I want you all to come away with today, one thing would be, it's not just Lake trout; Brown trout, Brook trout are also big predators on our native Cutthroat trout and, in stream systems, an even bigger threat is Rainbow trout in waters where they exist with Cutthroat trout. Because once you get Rainbow trout into a system with Cutthroat you get hybridization occurring and it's a loss of that population. Equivalent to an incurable disease, really I hate to think about disease in humans and that kind of stuff, but really it's the same kind of thing and in this case you can't reverse it. You really can't. Once that has occurred in a stream system, that DNA is there; it's within the population.  It can only go one way and that's worse.

That's the problem. That's the issue that we are dealing with.  And so when you look at the Park, and our status, what  do we have? What remains?  But in terms of the genetic status of the Cutthroat trout, in yellow is where we have hybridized fish populations; in blue where they remain genetically pure;  in red where they have be extirpated and they gray is sort of the fishless background that exists on this slide. And so, if we come from the Madison River here where originally Westslope cutthroat  country and now they're completely gone. And then move, because they placed Brown trout and Rainbow trout in the Hebgen Lake system and so on. And move up through the Gallatins, where we have learned through the last several years that the majority, all the populations that we have examined are now hybridized fish.  This is all Westslope cutthroat  trout country. And then as you come down into the Park,  in the Yellowstone River system, all these streams in the Northern Range, Hellroaring Creek,  Buffalo Fork,  Slough Creek and so on, are hybridized fish.  What we have is the Upper Lamar, we hope and we think it's a concern because there's no significant barrier here to prevent this emigration from expanding up in the Lamar. But our best information we have is that that's still a genetically pure cutthroat population. We have that, uh we have the Yellowstone Lake System above the great falls and then we have the Upper Snake, shown down here, which it turns out we are doing surveys there.  There's very few fish in the Snake but they are there.  Okay, they're there.  The Beckler is a hybridized cutthroat region as well.

Things are kind of going on real time is part of it too.   For example, we just recently documented the loss of what we thought we had up here in Fan Creek, but  pure fish we found that  the results came back that we've lost that population. And we're also just in the last few years been documenting the movement of rainbow trout up into Slough Creek above the falls, above the camp ground. And that's a significant, you know, a huge loss to us really.  That's a world famous cutthroat population that now rainbow trout have invaded.  So things are kind of going on now real time and when you think about this, all this blue which is genetically pure cutthroat country. All these streams for the most part around the lake, this is basically a lake population which uses the streams for spawning, for rearing and so on, but essentially what we are talking about are not stream resident populations but it's a lake and an(unclear) population for the most part.  So, genetically pure but what's going on here? And there are a few things, okay.

(We will wait for this to come up but) Three things mainly: The discovery of lake trout in '94 and a research that's been done points to about 1988 as the date of the original introduction of lake trout to Yellowstone Lake.  We've had a removal program going on and I'll talk about in a few minutes for the lake trout.  Whirling Disease first found in '98 but it was within fish within the lake, and they're spread throughout the lake but it suggest that the disease had been there prior to '98, okay. But that is when it was first found. And then of course now, the many years now of drought that we've had. Whirling Disease our hot zone for Whirling Disease is Pelican Creek. It's the second largest tributary to the Lake.  We've had difficulty finding fry within Pelican Creek. At one time we had tens of thousands of migrating fish, you know, during the spawning run and now we're very difficult time to find even just a few that run up that stream to spawn. So in our work  there, our research there has shown it is just of the charts in terms of it's severity.

So, you might ask the question you know, since the fish are mostly gone, “how long will will the disease persist?” And that's what's not really known. The bugger about this is these spores can exist in the sediments for an unknown period of time. Very resistant and so they're in that system within the sediments and the disease may persist.

Research, this is a new science on Whirling Disease and not a lot known on how this will play out.  We're hopeful of course that this will come back but we are not sure. The drought, is leading to things like this. If you've been around the lake area. This is on the eastern shore of Columbine Creek  comes down. We've seen this all around the lake, with the low flows, low runoff in the spring, we're not getting these flushing flows and we're getting a disconnect  of the tributaries from the lake. Especially during the period of mid-summer, late- summer and fall, when typically fry would be migrating from these stream systems to the lake. so you know they're not going to make it.  Right, they're not going to make it. So, it's just one more factor contributing to really a  I don't want to call it a total recruitment failure but certainly a huge one. Whirling disease, this kind of a situation where the fry can't get back to the lake prior to winter and then if they do they've got that gauntlet within the lake of the lake trout to run. Just a small thing going on there.

We have a couple of indicator data sets that give us an indication of what the cutthroat trout population is doing in the lake system.  One of them is our trap at  Clear Creek where there's a long data site that goes back  to the 1940's. With the number of upstream migrating cutthroat trout are common each year.  And I'll just you the period here  back to 1990, where in '90 this 35,000 fish were counted running up Clear Creek and then the trend to  1,400 fish counted this past summer. Actually there is 1,438 if you are interested in the exact number. That's how many ran up and this thing is shifting on it's own. How far it'll go but we're seeing a lot of really, really large fish; it looked like this and not a lot of smaller, younger spawning fish showing up in these streams right now. Beautiful fish though. So that's at Clear Creek over here on the eastern shore. This is where our trap is and , Karrie talked a little bit about the spawning stream surveys and they occur along this western side of the lake and it's people in this room that do this. Eric (unclear) is sitting here, Pat Parotty is somewhere in here. 

This is a study that was really started by Dan Reinheart back in the '80's I believe. At least the methodology that's   used.  Tom's been part of it and so on. So these data,  I'd like to present to you they're very similar in the pattern that you see but essentially it's not a hard count of fish; it's essentially they're walking the streams, they're enumerating, they counting the fish that they see as they go along these stream reaches. Walking the standard reaches each year, once a week for about eight weeks time, um each year. And so in terms of the cutthroat trout that are seen, they back in the late '80's  would see on the average, uh, over 70 fish each time they would go up on a trip or so. That has declined unfortunately to this past summer; I know the number was 35 total.  Thirty-five total fish seen over 8 weeks time over about a dozen streams surveyed, that kind of thing. Pretty dramatic, on that western side of the lake.  And then they also, as Carrie talked about, they looked for bear activity. What signs of bear activity are out there; whether it's a carcass torn up you know along the margin of the stream or is it fresh tracks, these kinds of things. (Scat and so on.) And you can see that in red now, the bear activity, which is on this other axis here,  it's in this tense here it's how much bear  use per stream date do they see. But it's a mirror, it's a mirror image basically. There's a little bit of a lag. But it's a mirror image of what the cutthroat trout, uh, spawning use has been.  And so it's an interesting question, what's happening? We still have a lot of grizzly's obviously in the park. It's not one for me to try to answer.  It looks like a displacement thing and what's it going to lead to, I certainly don't know. But there's so stuff seriously going on there, a shift, a shift for sure.

So, what can we do? I don't like giving doomsday speeches or anything like that. I hate that kind of thing so, what's good here?;  what can we do and what are we doing? There's certainly ways we can suppress these non native fish.  we can get towards  work on renovating streams; sort of restoring native fish, to places now that are occupied by non native fish. We can ask anglers for assistance in different ways. And we certainly need to look for ways to prevent additional introductions of non native and exotic species.

Of course a lot of this doesn't mean a whole lot;  it means something but it doesn't mean a whole lot if we just keep allowing, you know, introductions of more non native and exotic species. So, and they're going to keep coming at us.  But we do have an incredible program, I think.  It's one  you don't find anywhere else.  If you want to to do internet search or look around in the literature,  you're not going to find anything like this, anywhere else going on.  A  removable program of this magnitude just really doesn't exist for non native fish. And so on  Yellowstone Lake we kill lake trout and we do it in a pretty big way.  We have this boat the Freedom.  We also have another boat, a little smaller but two full crews  laying net and we have over ten miles of net in place on the bottom of Yellowstone Lake through the majority of the season. So there's a lot of net out there. 

we are fortunate  in that we are able to build up a program that it's got really good equipment and this crew that we have it's amazing this work that they do. It's not the cleanest,  you know, I mean they are pulling up fish that are pretty smelly. You know,  I mean  you hear about it; but You know, you know they've had a tough day and it's a net that's been out a while, that kind of thing. These folks are returning year after year. We have folks coming back for their 4th year this year. The majority of the crew is in their third year. A seasonal staff is pretty nice, pretty nice.  we also gain a lot of help from volunteers, coming out to work with us on the lake. And this is not a program that is just a YCR thing at all and we realize that and we appreciate very much all the support we get. It really crosses all divisions and  it takes a lot of effort for a lot of very different people. And there's no question, and we don't take that for granted;  I guess that's what I'm trying to say and we appreciate that.

What happens here; the blue bars are the number of lake trout that we kill every year.  '94 over there to '04 here, ten years of this stuff.  26,000 plus fish killed last year, over 100 thousand total  for this first decade or so of the program. This red bar is the effort from '99 to '01 I think it was something like a ten fold increase in the amount of net we laid.

Okay, that dropped off a bit in '04 this past summer because we really over shot our ability. I mean,  we were laying a lot of net; we had the crews out there pounding away on fish but we weren't repairing the nets, okay. We weren't keeping up with the maintenance on these basic things and that reality hit us this last year. It still resulted in a huge catch, but we'll see this overall effort stabilize now. Given the boats that we have now, the crew size we have;  the places we have to house the crew  that we have; and all these things there is only so much the lake area can take in this kind of a program. And that's sort of where we are.   this green is catch for effort and it was high like in '98.  It's the number of lake trout which was near 6,  lake trout killed for every unit of effort  that's out there. For every 100 meters of net laid over night at one time they were killing close to 6.

Now we've got that down, um, near one here and it came up a bit last year.  Okay, but that's what we want to see,  this thing stay relatively flat now.  If this shoots way back up, obviously, that's saying that there might be fish population that's really expanding out there and really growing and we don't want to see that.  Obviously

Audience member:   (unclear) much earlier out there at the very beginning of the program?

Todd Koel:  The catch effort, that though, this is a factor of just the amount of  net that's going out there though to.  The one thing about all this is that it's not equal effort. more and more net; it's very little early on in the program but more and more net is being laid.

Audience member: Gotcha

Todd Koel: and that impacts this as well, yeah.  so are we doing..  What's are effect out there? One sort of classic effect of over fishing on a fish population is a reduction in the size of the spawning fish.  We 're seeing that. This is the blue line.  Every year smaller and smaller, the fish are maturing at a smaller size and that's a classic, signal that you have a lot of pressure on a fish population in terms of exerting mortality. So we continue to see that the average length of the spawning fish going down.  It's very good and the red bars in the background are the number of spawning fish that we're killing.  That's a function of how much time we are spending on the spawning areas and we're learning that this is a critical place to be.  It occurs during September;  we know a few spots where they really focus on spawning and we're doing a lot of things now to uh remove those fish. Including electro fishing this past year, where in just a couple nights time the crews killed over 1,000 spawning fish in a few hours each night with electro fishing gear. Very, very  small areas you know, not even ½ the size of this room.  For example, off the ends of Carrington  Island, come in there with an electric fishing boat and the whole thing lights up with lake trout. So,  it's exciting if you're a fish biologist and you're after something that you really, really want to kill.

Audience: Laughter

Todd Koel:  And I'm a biologist.

Audience: Laughter

Todd Koel:  The cutthroat trout, it's a weird thing you know, you've got a  remove some fish to save other (native) fish.  Right, you've got a  kill some exotic fish to save cutthroat. I don't know but it is a unique situation that we're in there in Yellowstone and you go out across the country and talk about it and people are looking at you really funny. Because they spend millions of dollars trying to restore lake trout to the Great Lakes.  You know they're fishing down lake trout populations in Canada and you know here we come in and go teach us how we can remove ..  it's just the opposite  It's kind of neat though.

Our cutthroat trout within the lake we monitor with nets in the fall.  We've seen in recent years, these past two years, this has shifted this axis a bit I noted, but we're seeing more trout now showing up in our nets. We have 11 sites we monitor in the fall.   These are primarily smaller fish, juvenile fish coming back in to the lake population and I don't want you all to go cross-eyed now because really the way to look at this thing is straight on, straight on like this.  But this is so if your from the side you know,  I don't know what it's going to look like. This is length across the bottom of the fish from 100 millimeters to 550. And this is just in time '97 to 2004.  Just  focus on this like this bunch of fish right here; the big adult fish and you'll see that it shifts over to the right. And this bunch of fish get smaller, and smaller, and smaller as you go down;  getting larger, older and eroding. But at the same time, now as you get down into these later years, we see more smaller fish showing up in our nets each year and then you'll start to see those migrate through in size and time. And what we really need to see now is a return of those fish coming back in that we find in the lake, these juveniles back in the stream spawning the next few years. That's what we want to see and that's where we are headed. So, time will tell. Hopefully, we will get there.

We would also like to get to renovating stream systems. We want to reverse this trend. We're not there.  We are behind the eight ball actually.  This is going on around us.  The states are doing this; other parks are doing this.  It's not a new concept for the Park Service and it's where we want to go and what it involves is either using an existing barrier or creating these small  like beaver dam type barriers  about 4 feet in height or so and  depending on the stream.  Isolating some of  the  head water areas  and then doing a depopulation with an approved piscicides.   It's called antimycin. Where you remove the non native fish above these barriers and then you repopulate with genetically pure fish. We need to do this, while we still have an abundance of genetically pure fish to work with. The problem that people run into is if you wait till you're down to your last little basket of eggs and then  you say  well all right you better restore these populations, well then, you know, it's pretty tough to do.

Right now we are sitting in pretty good situation to be able to do this, especially for Yellowstone cutthroat trout. We've got everything ready to go in terms of our ground work through a park foundation funded project, Westslope Cutthroat Trout Project.  All of our field work and field assessments are done and we have prioritized our streams and we've started initial work now on an EA. Julia York is helping me with that. We know we want to focus our first renovation on Specimen Creek  up in the extreme northwestern corner of the park.  For Yellowstone cutthroat trout we are just getting off the ground now and working in the northern range we need to hold together our historical data, see where our holes. The field work, prioritize our streams in the northern range and then move forward with the planning and so on. But you'll see this now coming from us in the next couple of years moving to work on these small stream systems.

In terms of angler assistance, we've been asking anglers to help us remove lake trout and they are. we are extending this if you will a big step further. You know, anglers can also help us with these non native fish issues by removing some of these non native fish in the streams of the park. so what we've done, we have proposed changes to our fishing regulations for this coming 2006, not this spring, but a year from now. We've just went through a round of public meetings and talking to everybody  about this that we can. But essentially what it come down to is sort of cleaning the slate if you will for the park in terms of what our regulations have looked  like and put some meaning, I guess, behind what these regulations are. There's not really huge changes that you'll see, but more a little bit difference in just the statement that's coming from us. Where we have a large area of the park in the green here where we have native fish, Yellowstone cutthroat trout, Westslope cutthroat trout and so on where they coexist with non native fish.

We're calling this a Native Fish Conservation Area, where we'll have catch and release like we do  park wide for all of our native fishes. But we're asking anglers to take up to five non native fish of any species.  So, the parks always had a five fish limit but  it's always been three of those fish have had to be Brook trout. Now we are not distinguishing, not distinguishing among Brook trout, Brown trout, Rainbow trout. Okay? It can be a combined limit. So,  it's a liberalization of the take on some of these non native fish where they are doing harm to our native fish. Of course, Lake trout within Yellowstone Lake must  remain continued to be killed; that won't change. And we have no limit on Lake trout  down in Heart Lake  and that's because that's also a cutthroat trout fishery there; but it's in a backcountry situation so we are not requiring folks to mandatorily kill those Lake trout when they catch them there.  We don't ( it's do to) we don't need the carcasses along the shore and that kind of stuff. So, they can take as many as they want or not.

The rest of this, in this section of the park, call this a wild trout enhancement area where we'll have catch and release for all the native fish which do exist there to some degree. we also have catch and release for these prized Rainbow trout and Brown trout especially this run that comes, from the Hebegen Lake area, especially in the fall of the year. Okay, it's just a world class fishery there. Now, we'll still allow harvest in that area for the Brook trout and Lake trout because we are talking about the Madison; the lower Gibbon below the falls; the entire Firehole system up over the divide and then Shoshone and Lewis Lakes; everything above the falls here of the Lewis River, so that entire section of the park.  A lot of that was historically fishless, so the native cutthroat aren't there and that's why we have these regulations to protect the non native fish  here because  this, you know,  just the huge emphasis that these populations have over there. They are very prized by a lot of people, so for good reason.

Now there's a few exceptions.  You can still kill Brown trout and want to eat them if you want to have shore lunches up in the Lewis Channel.  It's a popular area for people to go backcountry camping area and that kind of thing. And we've increased the harvest for Lake trout in Lewis Lake. It's always been two fish and now we're just saying it should be more.  It's a stunted population.  We are asking people to keep more Lake trout out of Lewis Lake but only one large Lake trout. So, we want to skew that population away from what it is now which is stunted and there's way to many small fish,  20 inches and below,  that kind of thing. Allow more harvest of those and hopefully shift the population to more of a trophy fishery over time.  So people can still if they are on to big fish they can keep one if they want it but that's it. Okay.  (Laughter) They have to quite after that.

So, we're getting our eggs more in line with what our bordering states have.  This is not anything way abnormal. in Montana you can keep five combined trout; Wyoming six, Idaho six and so on. And this concept of liberalizing harvest limits for Rainbows is not new.  Actually,  Idaho now in the South Fork of the Snake, they are trying to protect  what remains there of cutthroat.  They now have unlimited harvest for Rainbow trout in the South Fork Snake. So it's not a completely a new concept to the region.  It's going on around us.

It will be important that people can recognize the fish that they are catching. actually statistics aren't real good.  Montana has done a study;  about 50% of the anglers that are out there can't identify the fish that they are catching. And so it will be important for us to make sure the anglers are educated.  What is come down to though is that if the fish has a slash, has the red slash, it needs to go back.  We are not asking people to identify varying degrees of hybridization or anything like that.  If it has a slash it has to go back. That won't change and it should make it our enforcement, no real difference there. ( In that regard.)

Just to say a couple things; it's getting right on noon here.  So about invasive, aquatic species and the fear I have of additional things moving into the park and what we hopefully will be able to head to some prevention measures.  We do have New Zealand Mud Snails and we've done some research there and their impacts are not good.  They consume over 90% of the primary productively of the streams where they exist and they exist in the Firehole, the Madison, Gibbon, Polecat Creek, Gardner River down here, and Boiling River and so on. But there are a lot of things we don't have and we certainly don't want. These things are moving around and they generally move around on boats, primary vector.  

This just the other day. There's a neat little news ad. All right, somebody buys the Lund Fisherman  down there in Indiana and then they haul it up here and try to dump it into the Canyon Ferry Reservoir.  Well, by the way you know the whole thing is covered with Zebra Mussels, okay.  So  luckily in Montana they are doing monitoring at their boat ramps and they pick this up before this ended up in the reservoir. That's the kind of thing that is going on around us. That's the kind of thing I'm really scared of for a park in that you know folks definitely are  coming across the country; they're putting their boat in Yellowstone Lake and Lewis Lake and so on. And we really need to be watching for these things.

There are some things that we are doing at our boat ramps. You'll see signs that look like this. Where we are asking people to please  have a look at their boats before they put it in the water. Not as worried about after it come out. What's it look like before it goes in.  It's a big concern. we're providing information now. You'll see ways for people to examine their boat, to clean it if necessary or their fishing gear. A brochure that we've put together,  it's in review right now and hopefully we'll be able to use it now this summer. But information so that the people who come, it's really, it's  on them.  It is and it's always going to be.  It's their responsibility.  But they needed to be aware of it and needed to know how to deal with it and that's what we're trying to provide for them is that kind of information.

So, I mean, in a perfect world, we would have some sort of control environment I guess with boat washing stations and a crew that could watch those stations and everything that came into the park would be sterile.   You know, that's just not going to happen and so we will do the best we can for right now. Also look into ask people to watch a video. And I don't think it'll be the this video, but it will be something like this where six or eight minutes long. Similar to if you get a backcountry camp site permit. Now you are going to get a boating permit, same kind of thing. Basic information on how you look over your boat prior to putting it in the lake. There're several options out there; the Cliffy option is just one. It's kind of neat in that it puts some humor in it; Into really a serious issue though.

Because all of these animals here are in some way or  another,  they have all been petitioned to be listed under the Endangered Species Act. decisions have come out on the cutthroat trout, where they won't be listed so now they're in the courts. Okay. The Grayling was initially warranted but precluded. Now that's be elevated to very near listing. In the last meeting I was at, suggested that by 2007  Fluvial Arctic Grayling will be listed.  This is the Grayling of the Gibbon River. There's some things going along the Gibbon River right now and so we'll have to keep on top of this.  You know there's a pretty large road project going on along the Gibbon River. So, we have graduate research going on to try and determine do we have a viable population of Fluvial Grayling in the Gibbon River right now. So , it's a high priority for us to get this answered.

What's the moral of this?  we are trying to reverse some of the effects of things that went on for decades in the 1800's,  early and mid 1900's.  Okay, now trying to reverse some of these things that took a long time to get this way.  Overnight it's not going to change but we have the momentum we think we can do it and at the same time, there's an on slot of some crazy critters.  There are 300  invasive exotic, aquatic exotics, moving from east to west essentially across our country knocking at our door.  So at the same time we're  trying to do these cutthroat preservations things in the park. There's a lot of things coming at us at the same time. So, no shortage of challenges right for everybody.  That's where we are. we've been uh lucky, very fortunate in that  there's been a lot of funding for the different things that I've been talking about here and there's several park service funding sources that are listed here.  But I especially want to point out the more non-park service things.

The GYCC every year has been funding our native trout work. The Whirling Disease Initiative every year is supporting research in the park and the Foundation, Yellowstone Association as well and the Park Foundation every year. A lot of what we do is do to the support we are able to get from these folks. Much appreciated. Also I want to thank my crew as well.  You guys probably see them running around the park; hopefully, you know, staying out of trouble. That would be a very, good thing. (Laughter) A very very good thing. (Laughter) Well, thank you all for listening; it's lunchtime so I appreciate your time.

Audience: Applause