Hybrid · Salmo trutta × Salvelinus fontinalis
Tiger Trout
Also called Tiger.
Short answer
A tiger trout is a sterile hybrid of a brown trout and a brook trout, marked with dense maze-like vermiculation across the whole body. It occurs occasionally in the wild and is stocked deliberately in several western states because it grows fast, eats aggressively and cannot reproduce.
How to identify a tiger trout
- Vermiculation
- Dense maze-like markings over the whole body, not just the back. The defining feature.
- Colour
- Brassy gold to olive, with orange fins. Brighter than either parent.
- Tail
- Squared like a brook trout rather than forked.
- Fins
- Orange with white leading edges, inherited from the brook trout side.
What a tiger trout is
The tiger trout is a cross between a female brown trout and a male brook trout. In the wild the pairing almost never produces viable young, which makes a wild tiger a genuine rarity; in a hatchery the cross can be made reliably, and the resulting fish is sterile. That sterility is precisely why fishery managers like it: a tiger trout can be stocked into a lake to control an overpopulation of small fish without ever establishing a breeding population of its own. They are aggressive, grow quickly and fight hard, and the dense vermiculated pattern that covers the entire flank makes them unmistakable.
- Native to
- Not native anywhere. A sterile hybrid of brown trout and brook trout, occurring rarely in the wild and produced deliberately in hatcheries.
- Typical size
- Fourteen to twenty inches commonly in managed lakes; the best waters produce fish over five pounds.
- What they eat
- Aggressively piscivorous. Tigers are stocked specifically to eat stunted populations of small fish, and they do.
Where tiger trout live
Stocked in mountain lakes and reservoirs across Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Montana and parts of the Northeast. Utah's Boulder Mountain lakes are the best-known tiger trout fishery in the country.
Fly fishing in Utah Fly fishing in Wyoming Fly fishing in Colorado Fly fishing in Idaho
Conservation status
Not a conservation category at all, since the fish is sterile and entirely managed. Stocking decisions are made water by water.
Protected status and the rules that follow from it are set state by state and change. Before you fish, check the current regulations for the water you are standing in — this page is a starting point, not a legal reference.
How to catch tiger trout
Fish a streamer, and fish it with movement. Tigers respond to aggression rather than imitation, and a leech or a baitfish pattern stripped quickly will out-produce a dead-drifted nymph most days. In the Utah mountain lakes where they are a target species, a balanced leech under an indicator is the local method and it is extremely effective.
- Vermiculation over the whole flank, not just the back, means tiger.
- They are sterile, which is why managers can stock them without consequences.
- Fish aggressively. Imitation matters less than movement.
Flies that work for tiger trout
Each of these is a card in the deck, and each has a full page in Our Fly-brary.
Keep reading
- How to release a trout — handling, and why it matters more for some species than others
- How to read water — where each of these fish holds
- Hatches and what trout eat — the food these fish are feeding on
- Fly fishing by state — which species you will meet, state by state
Rainbow Trout Brown Trout Brook Trout Cutthroat Trout Steelhead Bull Trout Lake Trout Golden Trout Arctic Grayling Dolly Varden Mountain Whitefish