A fish story too good to be true

One can imagine the consternation in Colorado when it was discovered that the 20-year effort to restore an endangered native trout had gone awry.

It must have been a big "oops" moment for biologists when they found they had used the wrong fish to stock waterways.

What was thought to be a successful recovery effort for the endangered greenback cutthroat trout instead turned out to be an eco-snafu. Instead of greenbacks, the biologists were re-stocking waterways with Colorado River cutthroat trout - a similar but more common fish.

As a result, genetic tests revealed that instead of 142 miles of waterways containing the greenback, there were only 11 miles.

Granted, it's more difficult to tell fish species and subspecies apart than it is to differentiate between, say, a grizzly and black bear.

But the Colorado confusion gives a black eye to biologists who no doubt were well-intended but ended up a little off-target for two decades.

FLATHEAD COUNTY voters deserve credit for making a new mosquito-control initiative possible.

Voters approved a 1-mill levy on the November 2006 ballot, thus making it possible to hire Bruce Gunderson as the county's first full-time mosquito-control officer.

As a recent Inter Lake story pointed out, this is important partly because of the danger of West Nile virus - which has killed four people in Montana this year and nearly 1,000 nationwide in the past six years - but also because of the general peskiness of the buzzing bugs.

Gunderson will spend his off-season tracking down likely breeding groups for mosquitoes, so that he can get to work next spring with planting traps and applying larvicide. Although you can't eliminate mosquitoes, we can mitigate the problems they cause substantially.

We had hoped, along with many others, that Glacier National Park's fledgling transit system would be a success, and it did not disappoint.

The new system, powered by a fleet of shuttles and buses, carried 132,093 riders over a 65-day operation season, averaging about 2,030 riders per day. Considering that the system was designed for an average daily load of up to 1,600 riders, the public's response was overwhelming to a point where adjustments were necessary to handle peak loads.

Park officials estimate there were 1,000 fewer vehicles per day on Going-to-the-Sun Road because of the shuttles and buses. That is a hugely important success for the system that should be appreciated by anyone who has encountered traffic jams or tried to find a parking space at Logan Pass.