Federal and state officials plan to announce Friday an agreement to spend more than a million dollars over the next five years to save California´s state fish.
If it´s successful, the effort would avoid having to list the golden trout as an endangered species.
Recent D-N-A testing found such alarming interbreeding among all remaining populations that there is a real possibility of extinction.
The California golden trout was designated the official state fish in 1947.
The subspecies of rainbow trout once was common in 450 miles of streams in the Southern Sierra Nevada.
But over the past 100 years its habitat has dwindled to about 80 miles of the Kern River and Golden Trout Creek in the Inyo National Forest.
This post was last modified on 01/31/2009 4:42 pm