Marshall Bloom—aka Dr. Trout—has a less-than-casual day job by most standards. When he punches the clock as associate director for scientific management at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, he throws on a positive-pressure suit and strolls into a “Biosafety Level 4” lab, where he works with the planet’s deadliest diseases—some of which could be exploited by bioterrorists. Dr. Trout—you guessed it—also has a penchant for fish and continues to make positive impacts on Montana trout habitats through conservation efforts with TU.
Via High Country News: “As chairman of Gov. Marc Racicot’s Whirling Disease Task Force from 1994 to the early 2000s, [I helped] draw together everybody from county commissioners to trout advocates to landowners to legislators. We got things going in the right direction — leave the fish alone, don’t try to intervene by stocking or anything like that, and the fish will on their own discover a way around this problem. We let that infectious disease burn itself out and gave the fish breathing room to evolve resistance to the parasite. In the Madison River in 1994 (the most famous example), rainbow trout had declined by 90 percent, and now those numbers are almost back up to what they were prior to the whirling disease. We were able to recruit to that cause world-class scientists, including a number from the National Academy of Sciences and one Nobel Prize winner, because of their love of Montana and their love of fishing.”
Hit the link for the full interview.
Tom Bie is the founder, editor, and publisher of The Drake. He started the magazine in 1998 as an annual newsprint publication based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He then moved it to Steamboat, Colorado (1999), Boulder, Colorado (2001), and San Clemente, California (2004), as he took jobs as managing editor at Paddler, Senior Editor at Skiing, and Editor-in-Chief at Powder, respectively. Tom and The Drake are now both based in Denver, Colorado, where The Drake is finally all grows up(Swingers, 1996) to a quarterly magazine.