Early Fish Stocking Detected in Pyrenees Lake

LAKE REDON, SPAIN—Phys.org reports that farmers were transporting live fish to stock mountain lakes in the Pyrenees much earlier than previously thought. High mountain lakes are often historically fishless due to natural barriers created by glaciers, as was the case with Lake Redon in northeastern Spain. The 240-foot-deep lake is isolated from fluvial waterways by a 330-foot waterfall, which makes it impossible for fish to naturally enter and colonize it. However, there are an estimated 60,000 brown trout living in it today. Historic documents record that the process of fish stocking was begun by at least the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Recent sedimentary DNA analysis, though, detected the presence of fish parasites in the lakebed dating back to between the seventh and ninth century. This suggests that late Roman or Visigothic farmers who used the region for sheep pasturing initially began stocking the lake with fish 500 years earlier than scholars originally believed. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Nature Communications. For more on archaeological research in northern Spain, go to "The Red Lady of El Mirón."