Fascinature short: Terrific trout
Join Poc and Kit as they splash into the river and make a magical discovery — tiny trout fry darting through the water! 🌊✨ In this short adventure, PocKit learn:
How trout can change their colours to blend into their surroundings 🪨
The incredible journey some trout take from stream to sea and back again 🌍
How some trout are explorers while others are happy home-lovers 🏡
Fascinature!
Trout are amazing! PocKit see a tiny flash in the stream and discovers it’s a TR–OU–T… a trout! But not only can these clever fish can change colour to blend in, depending on where they live, they can also adapt to live in local conditions, like higher acidity due to the kind of rocks and stones that make up the landscape where they live, for example.
Salmo trutta?! That’s trout to you and me…
The coolest bit is that brown trout and sea trout are actually the very same species! Some decide to stay at home in the river their whole lives, while others grow up to be brave explorers who swim all the way out to sea, and they change colour to brown or rainbow! Scientists still aren’t sure exactly what makes one trout stay and another head out on an adventure — it’s one of nature’s great mysteries.
But whether they’re home-lovers or world travellers, they all share something incredible: they always return to the exact river where they were born. The females make a little hollow in the clean gravel — called a redd — and lay their eggs right where their story began.
Trout do face some challenges, though, and this is where we humans can help. Silt from fields can wash into rivers during heavy rain. When too much of it settles on the riverbed, it clogs up the gravel, making it hard for trout to lay their eggs or for the tiny developing fish to breathe. And weirs — those small man-made walls across rivers — can act like giant staircases that trout can’t climb, blocking them from reaching the upper, quieter stretches of river where they prefer to spawn.
There are organisations like AVRA – the Axe Vale Rivers Association who are trying to help keep trout numbers up by incubating their eggs until they are old enough to be released into the streams and tributaries of the Axe. A lottery funded programme called Rivers Run Through Us are helping bring those eggs into schools so we can learn about how we can help them and watch them grow. Maybe they’ll come to your school if you’re lucky enough to live in the Axe Valley like PocKit are!