Help Us Find Salter Brookies

We've got a new technology that can quickly and inexpensively help locate wild trout populations.

The Sea Run Brook Trout Coalition (SRBTC) has received a small grant from a private family foundation to help fund studies to locate wild brook trout populations. However, the grant is just enough to get started.  We're using this opportunity to raise more money so we can expand into other areas.

eDNA (Environmental DNA) is a simple high-tech tool that helps us find those needle-in-a-haystack wild trout populations. By finding these extremely sensitive populations that may have been cut off from the critical habitat they need to spawn and grow, SRBTC can work to restore these special fish.

SRBTC helped pioneer the use of this technology in concert with University of Maine partners as a low cost, accurate way to find and conserve wild trout populations. From our initial work, we've learned that there are a lot more populations out there than anyone fully understands, and now we need your assistance to make our resources go further.

Your donations will help SRBTC to do the following:

1) Identify and prove wild trout exist in new locations.

2) Collaborate with other agencies, land trusts and private landowners to further evaluate potential salter streams.

3) Refine our understanding of what we can and cannot do with this new, emerging technology.

4) Train others in the use of this technology.

5) Conduct outreach through workshops and writing about our findings.  This could involve other states, other organizations - it all depends on you.

6) Ultimately help identify and prioritize where conservation efforts will be most successful.

Efforts are presently limited to a few tributaries in Massachusetts, but with additional funding, we'll be able to work in other coastal access streams that might still harbor wild remnant populations in other states.

Through the use of eDNA (Environmental Deoxy-riboNucleic Acid) technology, a small water sample collected from a brook or stream can tell us if there are trout in that system.  In simple terms, all living matter has DNA unique to their species.  All fish shed DNA as a consequence of living in that water.  And because DNA is unique on a species-by-species basis, one can collect a sample of water and test it to determine what kind of DNA is in that water. This groundbreaking technology, developed originally for the detection of invasive Asian Carp, has now, through partnerships with conservation genetics scientists at UMaine, helped SRBTC learn that salters are in fact extirpated from the Santuit River on Cape Cod.

This means the famous sea-run trout that once lived and returned to the Santuit River are no more. 

While this is extremely bad news, SRBTC has used this opportunity to achieve a series of firsts. Not only is it the first place we used eDNA, it is now also the first place where SRBTC and partners are doing extensive water quality testing to learn what might have caused the population to wink out.

But more to the point, the Santuit River is but one of possibly hundreds of unique systems along the New England coast that harbored unique populations of sea-run brook trout. It is our goal to try to determine where other salters exist so that our efforts are directed to conservation and restoration of these few remaining populations.

With your help we can avoid the loss of wild native brook trout populations.

Read about the loss of the Santuit River Salters >here

While this tool is both simple and inexpensive, the more we use it, the more we learn what we don't know.

Please help us advance our utilization of this powerful and inexpensive technology by donating today.

Any and all findings will be kept highly confidential, shared only with conservation partners.  While we will be writing about our findings, SRBTC will not reveal where sensitive populations are until they are both protected and conserved.

To learn more about the Sea Run Brook Trout Coalition, visit http://www.searunbrookie.org .

To learn more about eDNA, click here to read or listen to a recent article from National Public Radio.


The Sea Run Brook Trout Coalition is a 501-c-3 organization and all donations are fully deductible to the extent provided by law.

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