The trout pair on the spawning nest. The large fish behind is the sea trout female came from the Baltic Sea. It may be easily understood by the absence of red dots on her body. The small fish in front is the male. He has red dots in coloration, and this allows to identify him as the local brown trout its the sedentary form of this species living in fresh water all its life. The most of trout males are small and sedentary, and already at 2 years old they are ready to spawn both with sea trout and brown trout.
In my previous visit to Tartak I noticed the water clarity and thought its necessary to take here the aquabox for my camera next time. Now I took it and it was not in vain.In night time the sea trout females that just laid the eggs are very calm. If youre calm, too and avoid the rapid moves, you may walk on the water near the fish, take its photos at point-blank range and, if be careful, even touch it, stroke its tail or slowly take it off from the water. When sea trout reaches the upper part of stream, its skin is like a rubber to the touch because, overcoming the shoals with sand and pebble, it loses all its mucus.
This small fish is the yearling of the brown trout (Salmo trutta trutta). This fish is included into the Red Book of Belarus. Its settled form inhabits fast cold streams and may be numerous there, but the number of streams fit to this fish isn't high. Due to that it was assigned a second category of protection.
On my mind, the brown trout is one of the most beautiful fish living in Belarus. Just look at these points of different size and shape. The brown trout coloration differs a lot in different rivers: recently one guy shown me the photo of trout he caught in the Ussa river with the extremely atypical for Belarusian trout coloration.