When the first settlers of European descent arrived in Montana, they only found about 10 fish species in Flathead lake. The introduction of non native species have add numbers to that 10 fish species, including lake trout, lake whitefish, mysis shrimp, and many more. Adding these fish have started to cause havoc in the niches of native species, example the lake trout causing harm to the bull trout. The lake trouts population has increased drastically from the introduction of mysis shrimp, now we wonder what should we do about the lake trout numbers that are out of hand. We should manage the lake trout and try to make their numbers smaller instead of taking a ‘hand off’ approach. Flathead Lake is not the original place of lake trout and they are taking some of the natives food sources like the bull trout. Flathead Lake was iced as recently as 15-20,000 year prior. Ice being a tough place for fish to live, the low diversity is not surprising (Bansak, n.d.) This shows that the lake was not a place that fish could easily live. Of course this didn’t stop early fisheries managers, who brought in non native fishes to ‘improve’ Flathead Lake and the waters of Montana. Doing so in buckets, backpacks, mule trains, railroad cars, tanker trucks, and even …show more content…
This proves that many people believe that bringing in non native fish would help the native fish and not mess up the food chain in Flathead Lake. As shown in the article “Diet Overlap of Top-Level Predators in Recent