Hello everyone,

I have a pond in Ontario, Canada stocked with rainbow and brown trout. I would like to focus my harvest of the trout when they have well developed skiens so I can collect the eggs for bait when I fish our rainbow/steelhead rivers (in addition to the meat). I have harvested rainbows and browns throughout most of the year but am having a hard time finding when they have well developed skeins of roe.

Does anyone know what time of year rainbows and browns would have mature eggs in stocked ponds? Our wild rainbows in the rivers spawn in the spring but I have seen hatcheries here spawn rainbows in the fall, so I am not sure what it would be like for my pond. I kept this rainbow this week (14") and it has very tiny skeins that were just about as small as they can be while still being noticable.



On the other hand, I kept this brown at around the same time (end of September) a couple of years ago and you can see the eggs are still immature but much more developed than the ones in the rainbow.





Any insight on this is appreciated.

Thanks very much.

Fyfer,

The brown spawn fall while the rainbows are spring spawners. The precise time I will defer but consistent with this the eggs of your fall caught trout, the brown was close to ready but the rainbow was not. I would look for the rainbow eggs some time after ice out noting the water temps and date. Same can also be said of the browns only you would start end of September. You might do some research on optimum spawning temps which might provide a better start for your attempts.

Thanks very much for your response. I wasn't too sure when the rainbows would have eggs, as for some reason the hatcheries I've seen here have loose hens in the fall and spawn them in the fall. But it seems it must be spring due to the immature eggs in that rainbow in my pond.

I will try keeping a brown towards the end of October to see how the roe is coming along. Hopefully I can get this keyed in as the roe is a huge bonus to have.

Thanks again.

The hatcheries might be able to manipulate water temp and photoperiod to get them to spawn outside of their normal spawning season.

That makes sense. I was wondering how their rainbows spawn in the fall.

So I harvested a female brown trout yesterday and it seemed to be the perfect time, because the eggs were starting to come out of the membrane but were not loose yet (I prefer to scrape eggs rather than have them loose). But the fish was very skinny, and the within the skien, there were lots of small eggs that look like they didn't develop. Is this because the fish was too skinny and didn't have the ability to produce more eggs? It obviously was not eating pellets like the other trout. There were just a few bugs in her stomach.

Any info on what these might be would be appreciated.