Splake: The Brook Trout and Lake Trout Hybrid

A splake is a hatchery-made cross between a lake trout and a brook trout, almost always a female lake trout and a male brook trout. The name joins the brook trout’s old name, “speckled trout”, with “lake trout”, and in parts of Canada the fish is called a wendigo. Fish culturists have made splake since the early 1870s, and state and provincial hatcheries now stock them in cold lakes where neither parent does well. A typical splake is 10–18 in (25–46 cm) and 1–3 lb (0.5–1.4 kg). Read on to tell one from its parents, know what the fish can and cannot do in the wild, and find them through the year.

The only sure way to identify a splake is on the cleaning table. Count the finger-like sacs where the stomach meets the gut: a brook trout has 23–55, a splake 65–85, a lake trout 93 or more. The ranges never overlap.

Splake vs brook trout vs lake trout

On the outside a splake falls between its parents, and it can lean toward either one. Maine’s biologists write that misidentification as either parent “is common”. Wisconsin ranks the tails in order: the lake trout’s is deeply forked, the splake’s moderately forked, the brook trout’s only slightly. Ontario adds the spots: pale spots on a dark back like both parents, some red spots, but without the blue halos a brook trout wears.

The mark that never lies is internal. Pyloric caeca are small, sac-like projections at the junction of the stomach and the intestine, and each species carries a fixed range of them.

To count caeca, open the belly as if cleaning the fish, find where the stomach ends, and tease the cluster of short fingers apart with a knife point. Up to about 55 is a brookie, 65–85 is a splake, and 93 or more, often a thick bundle, is a laker.

For the parents in full, see the brook trout and lake trout pages.

Can splake reproduce?

Yes, and that makes them unusual. Most hybrid fish, the tiger trout among them, are sterile. Maine’s management plan calls the splake the only salmonid cross capable of reproducing for an indefinite number of generations. Hatchery work in the 1950s showed splake are not sterile, and that a male splake crossed back to a female brook trout produces live young.

In the wild the answer is different. Maine’s plan, written after more than a century of stocking across North America, found “no credible documentation of splake reproduction in the wild”. The 2016 Lake Superior study by Feringa and colleagues could not document it either. What it did find is why managers worry:

• On lake trout spawning reefs near Copper Harbor, Michigan, twenty years of fall sampling caught 1,315 lake trout and 609 splake. In some years splake outnumbered the lake trout on the reef.
• On average 56% of those splake were sexually mature, and 28% of the mature ones were ripe or already spent.
• Splake turned up in two brook trout spawning rivers 25–30 miles (41–48 km) from the nearest stocking site.

Maturity itself comes early. At Maine’s Piper Pond, splake began to mature at age two and all were mature by age four, a pace closer to a brook trout’s than a lake trout’s.

Wisconsin ended splake stocking in Lake Superior after the spring of 2025, after more than 50 years, citing its genetic guidelines and a lake trout population that now sustains itself. It planned to raise brown trout stocking by 30–40% to fill the gap.

Growth and why hatcheries stock them

Splake carry hybrid vigor: the first generation grows faster than either parent. Maine can grow them to 18 in (46 cm) two years after stocking, and in its study waters splake survived to age four where stocked brook trout rarely lived past one. Maine’s netting data from waters stocked with both:

In twelve years of sampling in the region, no brook trout older than four turned up; splake reached eight. That longevity is the whole point. A splake lake gives anglers a trout fishery in water where brook trout would be caught out or die young and where lake trout would never establish.

Maine began stocking splake at Long Pond in Washington County in 1958 and now manages about 53 waters primarily for them. It keeps them out of waters with significant wild brook trout fisheries. Ontario stocks splake across much of the province and notes they tolerate marginal trout water, such as low-pH lakes.

Where they live and what they eat

Splake want cold water like both parents. Maine’s plan puts their preferred temperature between the lake trout’s (about 54 °F) and the brook trout’s (about 61 °F). In Colorado’s Parvin Lake, gill nets set after the lake stratified caught no splake anywhere the water was over 60 °F (16 °C); they held in the lower thermocline and in a spring-fed bay. In summer, look deep; the trout water temperature chart shows the band.

For their first year splake eat invertebrates, then turn to fish. In Maine they are most likely to eat smelt and white perch, and also take yellow perch, crayfish, sunfish and minnows.

How to catch splake

Ontario’s advice is short: splake are shy and easily spooked, so go light. Fish them in shallow water just after ice-out with light tackle or flies, and follow them deeper as the water warms, with small minnow-imitating plugs, spoons, spinners and jigs. Through the ice they are one of the most catchable trout there is: Maine recorded ice-fishing returns of about 78% of the splake stocked in one study water.

A practical year:

• Ice-out and spring: cast small spoons, inline spinners and streamers along shorelines and inlets while the surface is still cold.
• Summer: troll or jig at the thermocline, the same depths as the lake trout fishing methods but lighter.
• Fall: splake move onto rocky shoals and inlets with the spawning urge, and gather where lake trout spawn.
• Winter: jig small spoons tipped with a minnow, or fish a live smelt or shiner under a tip-up.

When Wisconsin stopped stocking them, one Lake Superior charter captain put the loss plainly: splake are a near-shore fish and easier for sport anglers to catch than lake trout.

Are splake good to eat?

Yes. Take Me Fishing calls the splake an excellent food fish, and Maine manages most of its splake waters as harvest fisheries, with length limits so the fish reach 12 in and more before they are kept. Cook one like a brook trout. Check the state rules for the water first: bag and length limits on splake waters vary from general trout rules to one-fish trophy limits.

Records

The world-record splake weighed 20 lb 11 oz (9.4 kg), the Ontario record at 20.71 lb. Paul Thompson caught it in Georgian Bay near Wasaga Beach on 17 May 1987, on a red fluorescent Rapala; it measured 35 in (89 cm) with a 23.3 in girth. Maine’s state record is 10 lb 3 oz (4.6 kg), from Basin Pond, one of the first two waters stocked when Maine restarted its splake program in 1981.

Related

The trout hub covers every trout and char in North America. The splake’s parents are the brook trout and the lake trout; its sterile cousin is the tiger trout.