Tiger Trout, a sterile Brook/Brown hybrid put in some lakes to control pest fish, in this case here in Idaho, numerous stunted perch.

The fly rod is a Orvis Far n Fine 5wt

No snakes in that water? I'd be afraid to wade around here. {{shudder}}

Nice fish! Hoping to get out and do some fishing this weekend. I got my fly equipment set up...needed to replace the line and backing. Hoping to head down into the southern part of Colorado just north of the New Mexico line...Trinidad Lake and the Purgatoire River.

Where in Idaho do you live? I went to Coeur d'Alene about 5 years ago to buy a gun collection. I found myself surrounded by the most paranoid bunch of paramilitary crazies with whom I ever come into contact.

weren't you just snowshoeing like a week ago???

Nice fish!

Simmer down wrote:No snakes in that water? I'd be afraid to wade around here. {{shudder}}

Idaho doesn't have any cottonmouths. They have some rattlers but that's pretty much it so their waters are pretty safe. They have a bunch of non venomous water snakes but the only thing they are dangerous to are frogs and blood suckers and aquatic insects and little fishes. They are nice to have around. You Texans have an abundance of cottonmouths but they are surprisingly docile and they don't like wasting venom on something the size of a human. The LD50 of their venom is so high you have to work to die from it anyway.

[LD50 is the Lethal Dose measured in milligrams of venom per kilogram of victim weight. The lethal dose varies depending on whether it is injected in you subcutaneously, intra muscularly, or intra venously. Nevertheless, it takes quite a lot of cottonmouth venom to send a full grown man to the Pearly Gates. Most vipers, including cottonmouths, don't like to inject a lot of venom if they can avoid it and roughly half their bites will be "dry bites." It takes them 10 days to three weeks to replenish their stock of venom and they prefer using it only on something they can eat. One of the reasons baby vipers are considered so dangerous, even though they have less venom available than adults, is they don't have the ability to control how much they inject and they'll give you all they've got. One of the guys we drink coffee with at night is a herpetologist who just got bitten by a prairie rattler a couple weeks ago. It was a dry bite and he knew it was because there was no pain at the bite site after the snake let him go. Why am I boring you with all this shit? Sorry.]

Black Eagle wrote:

Simmer down wrote:No snakes in that water? I'd be afraid to wade around here. {{shudder}}

Idaho doesn't have any cottonmouths. They have some rattlers but that's pretty much it so their waters are pretty safe. They have a bunch of non venomous water snakes but the only thing they are dangerous to are frogs and blood suckers and aquatic insects and little fishes. They are nice to have around. You Texans have an abundance of cottonmouths but they are surprisingly docile and they don't like wasting venom on something the size of a human. The LD50 of their venom is so high you have to work to die from it anyway.

[LD50 is the Lethal Dose measured in milligrams of venom per kilogram of victim weight. The lethal dose varies depending on whether it is injected in you subcutaneously, intra muscularly, or intra venously. Nevertheless, it takes quite a lot of cottonmouth venom to send a full grown man to the Pearly Gates. Most vipers, including cottonmouths, don't like to inject a lot of venom if they can avoid it and roughly half their bites will be "dry bites." It takes them 10 days to three weeks to replenish their stock of venom and they prefer using it only on something they can eat. One of the reasons baby vipers are considered so dangerous, even though they have less venom available than adults, is they don't have the ability to control how much they inject and they'll give you all they've got. One of the guys we drink coffee with at night is a herpetologist who just got bitten by a prairie rattler a couple weeks ago. It was a dry bite and he knew it was because there was no pain at the bite site after the snake let him go. Why am I boring you with all this shit? Sorry.]

Hey, you ain't boring me, that's interesting stuff. I'd never heard about 'dry bites' even.

Do those hybrid trout have more color when you first reel them in?

Black Eagle wrote:

Simmer down wrote:No snakes in that water? I'd be afraid to wade around here. {{shudder}}

Idaho doesn't have any cottonmouths. They have some rattlers but that's pretty much it so their waters are pretty safe. They have a bunch of non venomous water snakes but the only thing they are dangerous to are frogs and blood suckers and aquatic insects and little fishes. They are nice to have around. You Texans have an abundance of cottonmouths but they are surprisingly docile and they don't like wasting venom on something the size of a human. The LD50 of their venom is so high you have to work to die from it anyway.

[LD50 is the Lethal Dose measured in milligrams of venom per kilogram of victim weight. The lethal dose varies depending on whether it is injected in you subcutaneously, intra muscularly, or intra venously. Nevertheless, it takes quite a lot of cottonmouth venom to send a full grown man to the Pearly Gates. Most vipers, including cottonmouths, don't like to inject a lot of venom if they can avoid it and roughly half their bites will be "dry bites." It takes them 10 days to three weeks to replenish their stock of venom and they prefer using it only on something they can eat. One of the reasons baby vipers are considered so dangerous, even though they have less venom available than adults, is they don't have the ability to control how much they inject and they'll give you all they've got. One of the guys we drink coffee with at night is a herpetologist who just got bitten by a prairie rattler a couple weeks ago. It was a dry bite and he knew it was because there was no pain at the bite site after the snake let him go. Why am I boring you with all this shit? Sorry.]

Not boring at all, I love snakes. I grew up on the Buffalo Bayou in Houston. We had 5 varieties of venomous snakes in our backyard. I've travelled all around the world, and to this day the only snake that scares me are cottonmouths (water moccasins). Those sum'bitches are aggressive. They will chase you, drop out of trees on you, and crawl up a brick wall and hang over a doorway. Plus, they stink like skunks. They may not kill you, but they will haunt your nightmares. Give me a cobra any day.

I hear black mambas are worse and a lot deadlier; but I'm so rarely in rural Africa.

Nice trout, by the way. I've never caught or even heard of Tiger Trout, are they mainly a lake trout?

I've never heard of dry bites either, but then a tiger trout is new to me, too (nice fish). Copperheads are very common where I used to live around the Gorge. They'd crawl out on the pavement at night for warmth, so for 6 months out of the year, they littered the road where they got run over. Copperheads are slow and lazy, the biggest risk was stepping on them, especially at night in the yard. It was pretty common to kill 3-footers in the yard in that area. There are rattlers too, but they avoid humans like the plague. Damn, that was a snaky place, a veritable temperate jungle. An ER nurse in Irvine told me they didn't administer anti-venom anymore because of liability issues. It's rare for a North American snake to kill a person but they'll make you sick as a dog.

The most humorous story I've ever heard about dealing with snakebites was on the way down to Sturgeon Creek in Owsley County to go muskie fishing with a neighbor. I asked Russell how people back in the hills dealt with snakebites and he said some take the lead wire on a lawnmower engine off the sparkplug, put it on the bite, then crank the starter. That's a bit of a shock for those unfamiliar with small engines, not unlike a stun gun. I was speechless and thought it was one of the dumbest things I ever heard. A couple of months later I picked up a National Geographic while waiting in a dentist's office and read about a caravanserai crossing the Sahari from Nigeria to Libya. The head of the caravan kept a cattle prod (a stun gun on a 3-foot handle) for sand viper bites. Apparently high voltage is a remedy for venomous snakebites.

I came by my interest in venomous snakes naturally. In the early 1950s, my dad taught toxicology at the U. of Florida med school and among the toxic things that interested him was snake venom. He and the dean of the med school were big bass fishermen and they used to fish a lake that was a swamp at one end and loaded with cottonmouths. I went with them a few times and John is right, they drop out of trees and into your boat. Since my childhood, I have searched out venomous snakes all over the world from the deep South, to Central America, to Africa, and to Asia. Some of them give me the willies [the fer de lance] and some of them make me want to bring them home as pets [the boomslang] but I'm actually not that stupid.

By the way, John, the biggest, ugliest, worst smelling cottonmouth I've ever seen was just outside of Houston, Texas. Whenever someone mentions cottonmouths, that's the snake that comes into my mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_trout

An interesting read.