It is a little late for spring but fortunately, we started this year only on 23rd June, due to other previous obligations of the project leader dr. Alain Crivelli. Fortunately, I have said! It was raining before every day and later, during our field work, we enjoyed sunny, hot weather.

What we discovered was pretty sad. The floods on 18th September last year almost annihilated two populations of genetically pure marble trouts. The first was an original one, discovered in 1995 and monitored since than. In two sections, where the fish were taged and monitored twice annually, we normally found around 150 fish. This year, there were only 5!! In autumn, we are going to check the entire stream in order to see, how many fish remained altogeher. The monitoring will continue because we want to see whether the population could recover even after such a catastrophic event.

The second one was a new population, created in 1996 in one previously fishless stream. Since than, the whole population was beig monitored every year and normally there were found aproximately 250-300 fish. Now, there remain only 10.

The distance between both streams is around 20km and in between flows the third stream, also containing one original population, which escaped completely unaffected.

Apart from monitoring the populations of marble trout, more and more emphasis is beig given to the competition between rainbows and other trouts. Until now, only one stream containing an original population of genetically pure marbles, mixed with rainbows was being monitored twice annually since 2003. The rainbows were introduced by local fishermen more than 30 years ago and they reproduced naturally. However, they normally don"t exceed 5% of the total population. Since there exist more streams with mixed populations, three more have been included in the research.

In the first one, there are rainbows, sharing the stream with pure brown trouts. We were shocked not to found even one 1+(one year) or 2+(two years) old brown trout. There were only older brown trouts but rainbows of all age classes. The research in the following years will hopefully clear this anomaly.

The second new stream contains hybrides (marbles x brown trouts) and rainbows and the third one marbles and rainbows. In both of them, the percentage of rainbows was bigger.

So, there are many new, interesting questions, awaiting clarification from the future research. Next field work will take place in September.

Last Friday, the whole stream Lipovšček was checked. In the spring we found only a few fish in the sections monitored since 1996. Therefore, we decided to check the whole stream this year. We found 36 fish and some of them were already juveniles from this year. So, we hope, the fish will successfully repopulate the stream in the next years.