Brian, thanks, good info. Glad you are getting involved in So-Cal. Can you find out anything about which lakes will be assessed? You are naming off some lakes that avoided the stocking ban initially because they are larger than 1,000 acres. Is DFG evaluating everything?

You brought up some interesting points, like the notion of stocking sterile trout. That could be a great compromise for the places that have steelhead downstream. I can tell you a few stories about the amazing trout fishing below lake Cachuma back 15 years ago. We would hike down there and catch big 2lb+ stocked trout that had come over the dam. Here's a photo of one. You can see the rubbed off tail:

http://www.calfishing.com/gallery/d/700-2/robsy.jpg

At the time it was Wed/Sat/Sun barbless c-n-r only so we were all legal. Thomas Bouyants with single hooks were great. I digress...

Point is, on the dams that spill over, stocked trout do go downstream. After 15 or 50 years of this, you could argue that all the damage that is going to be done to the gene pool has been done, but maybe not. Who knows. Has anyone ever seen a planted trout spawn with a steelhead? Who knows. Need to research and find out.

Either way, a sterile trout is great to catch and good for any steelhead dumb enough to try and spawn with a stocked trout. So it's interesting.

As far as frogs and amphibians and other things that trout might eat, that's a whole other story. It would be easy to say that just about any lake in this state could be potential habitat for an endangered species. Will that be the test? Or will the endangered species have to be there right now for DFG to stop stocking forever?

At the risk of sounding like I hate native species, I should point out that in some places planting trout was an ill conceived plan from day 1 and we shouldn't plant there any more. But in most man-made lakes that have been getting trout for 20 or 40 or 100 years you will have to really convince me of the benefits of stopping stocking trout.

This will be a location-by-location issue and I can guarantee if fishermen sit back and do nothing there will be no trout to fish for and no swimbait bass to fish for either.