brookie colors?

[milligan trout degree]

From seeing pictures on the board and catching a few myself, I've noticed a difference in some of the brookies caught in the park. The few I've caught in the cosby area (cosby creek, and some feeder stream on the hen hollow trail) that they had dark stripes on them with the normal blue and orange dots. then other brookies I've caught on ramsey's prong, didn't have the stripes at all and it was just the dots. that fish was a bit bigger than the others I've caught. Maybe that had something to do about it, but I don't know. Is it just the stream difference that makes them different from other areas?

[ijsouth]

The dark marks are probably parr marks; most of the brookies in Cosby are a bit on the small side, so that's why you see them. As the trout get older, they fade away, but I guess since most of the trout in the Smokies have such short lives, most of them (of all species) have some parr marks.