Science Forums 2

[Fishteacher73]

While I am personally not familliar with these specific hybrids, yes most hybrids are sterile. I am sure that there may be abberations that are fertile, but the trick would be to find the other statistical oddity. (Not impossible, but reasonably unlikely). Usualy when hybrids are introduce into the "sport" realm of animals it is for two reasons:

A) Increased size of the target animal (Everyone wants a bigger fish)

B) Better ability to survive various abiotic factors (Temp., water chemistry,etc) (Allows them to get bigger too).

In many streams where I grew up (TN outside the Smokey Moutain Nat'l Park) many of the streams were stocked with rainbow trout. These fish slowly replaced the indiginous brown trout. Only a few streams still have brown trout in them (The water system is broken up by many waterfalls that reduces the ability to move populations up-stream).There are down-sides to external stocking. This has been done for about the last 15 years, and I have not seen anything that indicates that they are spreading.

Non indiginous animals can cause a lot of problems. Hawaii 's fauna has ben decimated by foriegn species. Much of Austrailia's wildlife is threatened because of invader species. There is even thought that there is a sustainable breeding population of Burmese pythons now in FL.

Many areas stock tilapia sp. (an African cichlid) in thermally poluted waters (Dams power plants, etc). They survive well and are not a bad food fish. They really cannot move outside of these areas because the water temp is too cold to facilitate breeding.