Silver Trout

The silver trout was about a foot long. It had an olive-green back that faded to a bright silver underside tinged with vermillion. Females had faint golden spots along their side. Males were darker-colored with more red on the belly, and had small red spots within their golden spots. Size-based sexual dimorphism was also far more pronounced among the silver trout than among other char, with males being much larger than females, as opposed to only a slight size difference in other char species.

The silver trout was an exceedingly rare fish, having become trapped by changed drainage systems in two New Hampshire lakes (Dublin/Monadnock Pond and Christine Lake in Stark) that were left as successors of Lake Hitchcock, a very large glacial lake that persisted for 4,000 years where the silver trout probably evolved from brook trout. In the deep waters of these lakes, cut off from other species, the silver trout had no natural predators. In Kendall's 1914 monograph, an 1884 letter from a local fish warden is reproduced. The warden states that both silver and brook trout were captured from Dublin Pond for a project to stock nearby Stone Pond. It is unknown whether this effort was successful.

The silver trout inhabited the deeper reaches in the center of Dublin/Monadnock Pond for most of the year, migrating to the shallows to spawn during the fall. These migrations were apparently timed precisely to the first day of October, with it being alleged that a fisherman could harvest several dozen pounds on October 1 when they had caught none the previous day. They congregated around cavities in submerged rocks along the shoreline during spawning. The silver trout was apparently one of only two native gamefish species that originally inhabited Dublin Pond prior to the introduction of other fish species. The other was a "perch" of uncertain affinities that inhabited an entirely different reach of the pond. The silver trout and the perch were never seen or caught together.