Photo: Kamal Hamid/Flickr

The Government of Canada announced that the entirety of Kootenay National Park is closed to watercraft and all fishing, effective until March 31, 2025. The closure is to protect the waterbodies within Kootenay National Park from whirling disease, a parasite that impacts fish and is impossible to eradicate once established in a water system.

The release from Canadian government doesn’t specify if there’s been a whirling disease scare nearby, but we can assume that’s likely. It seems that, other than warming water temperatures and continued dewatering of rivers and streams, the biggest threat to most trout fisheries is aquatic invasive species of some sort. We recently saw this play out on the Snake River in Idaho, when officials there discovered quagga mussels in the river. An entire section of the Snake near Twin Falls was treated to remove the mussels, killing all other fish in that section of river, as well.

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