Needham is a good lineage for trout behavioral studies.
His father was pretty good at aquatic insects as well!
Loved reading their works for reference and learning about aquatic communities.
Check them out, starting with this site regarding Paul Needham. Provides some background and how he and dad were affiliated with Cornell University.
Also, I had a radio program - brief because was not profitable - and interviewed a retired biologist up in Erie who was involved with the state's first attempts at raising trout for stocking.
He told me that the first attempts were with wild trout, but they didn't survive well in raceways.
According to him (whose name evades me and he has since died since we talked), the flood of 1936 wiped out the raceway efforts and the Commission then imported hatchery-suitable, selected rainbow trout.
I believe he said they were from Virginia.
However, he's gone and the validity of his words cannot be done.
A neighbor in the village in which I was raised operated a very small trout raising operation in a very early created "spring house". It still stands but was converted into a small business rental. Nice Victorian -probably earlier - building. Very large for a spring house. This one seemed to be preserved for drinking water, rather that also trenched for cooling milk.
He stripped eggs and sperm and contained them in wire boxes suspended above the boiling-like spring water. He also built a field stone raceway, wired to segment the different sizes.
He showed me the whole setup. It was about at most three football fields away from my house. He lived two houses away, at the end of the road.
He also bred his own palominos, before the state stocked them from the lineage that became the state stocking breed.
The trout he had came from Pacific sea-run rainbows, and they did not do well at all as far as staying where they were stocked.
They would be heading downstream quickly. Very quickly.
But they were very bright red beautiful and served the very, very local village sportsman's club well.
