My beginnings are humble, but none-the-less magnificent. I am, scientifically, a Salvelinus fontinalis, or more commonly known as a Eastern Brook Trout. I also have a few regional names, such as specs, brook charr and brookie among others. I prefer to spell that with a ‘y’ instead of ‘ie’, so don’t get stressed at what you may perceive as a mispelling. That’s how I spell my name. So, it’s OK.
I am a native North American species of salmonid. My family is Salmonidae, but the sub-group that I claim as ‘family’, are the Char. We char have one very consistant and highly distinquishable feature – uncommon to the rest of our Salmonidae members. We char have a strong white leading edge, followed by a dark stripe on our pectral, ventral and anal fins. We also have beautiful red spots marked by blue halos. And aside from these admirable features, we’re just plain gorgeous. We are favored by many in the upper levels of the food chain. Humans love us so much they work hard to protect us and even have us mounted and put on their walls to look at us. Pretty cool, eh?
Our place in the annals of North American salmonid fisheries is well documented, but because of the introduced immigrants we share our home waters with, like the rainbow and brown trout, we get a bum rap and exterpated (that’s different than exterminated, but not much) at the same time. It sucks and that’s all there is to it. But we make the best of it and keep on keepin’ on.
We brook trout, now hail from all over the north american continent, but our origins are from the area east of the Mississippi River; the real Mississippi… you know, the one that STOPS just north of St. Louis, MO and is a tributary of the mighty Missouri River! But that is another story we’ll have to discuss later, isn’t it?.
As you can see from this map, 
we brook trout have been emmigrated, much like out western North American cousins the rainbow trout and our European cousins the German brown trout. We are not found in numerous waters in Europe, South Africa, to Australia and New Zealand. We also occur in South America in both fresh and salt water; much like we do in eastern Canadian provinces.
When we brook trout work out in big saltwater, we are called speckled-trout, sea-trouth, coasters or breac (French Canadian). Folks in the Great Lakes call us coasters, too; because the big water and bountiful supplies of forage fish bulk us up similar to the saltwater environment. We get big and brawny, giving our cousins a real run for their money on size and we completely blow them away with our colors and beauty.
Well… that’s what eveyone says. Please forgive us for this bit of prejudice, but we brook trout believe it, too.
Like many other species that have preceeded us, in the last century, we, too have lost whole segments of our family. The brook trout populations which inhabited the waters of Michigan’s Upper and Lower penninsulas and the northern wisconsin woods, known as the . Another subspecies called the Aurora trout was determined to be distinct subspecies of our brook trout family. Of course, we knew this all along, but it was only made ‘public knowledge’ – at least in the human world – when Dr. Arthur Henn, first identified the samples brought to him from a Canadian shield lake. Dr. Henns’ findings were
As well, we have a few ‘recent entries’ into the family, courtesy of the meddling of human gene-cowboys. The Splake (Salvelinus namaycush X Salvelinus fontinalis) is a hybrid cross between a male Lake Trout (Salvelinus namaycush) – a member of our char sub-family – and the female Brook Trout.
