Splake: Identification, Reproduction, Record and Fishing

Splake under water: pale spots on a gray-green side and orange, white-edged lower fins — Photo: Angelena Sikora, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (public domain)

A splake is a hatchery-made cross between a lake trout and a brook trout, usually a female lake trout and a male brook trout. Hatcheries stock them in cold lakes where neither parent does well, and a typical splake is 10–18 in (25–46 cm) and 1–3 lb (0.5–1.4 kg). The name joins the brook trout’s old name, “speckled trout”, with “lake trout”; its other name is wendigo. Fish culturists have made splake since the early 1870s.

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.

How do you tell a splake from a brook trout or a 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”. The tail is the quickest outside clue: the lake trout’s is deeply forked, the splake’s slightly to moderately forked, the brook trout’s square to slightly forked. The spots help too. A splake has pale spots on a dark back like both parents and some red spots, but none of 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.

Mark	Brook trout	Splake	Lake trout
Pyloric caeca	23–55	65–85	93 or more
Tail	Square to slightly forked	Slight to moderate fork	Deeply forked
Spots	Pale, plus red with blue halos	Pale, some red, no blue halos	Pale, no red
Lower fins	Orange-red, white edge, black line	Tricolored	White edge, no black line; can be orange
Typical size	6–13 in (15–33 cm) in streams	10–18 in (25–46 cm)	18–24 in (46–61 cm)
Record	14 lb 8 oz (6.6 kg)	20 lb 11 oz (9.4 kg)	72 lb (32.7 kg)
Where	Native, eastern streams and ponds	Hatchery only, stocked lakes	Native, deep northern lakes

To count caeca, open the belly as if cleaning the fish and find where the stomach ends. 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 is a laker.

The parents have their own pages: the brook trout and the lake trout.

Where do splake live, and what do they eat?

Splake want cold water like both parents. Maine’s management 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.

Splake are never native, so you fish for them where an agency stocks them. In the East that means Maine, with about 53 waters managed mainly for splake, and Ontario. Wisconsin stopped stocking them in Lake Superior after 2025. Michigan stocked about 90,000 a year in the mid-2010s. In the West they live in cold mountain lakes and reservoirs. Colorado lists them at North Lake, a trout-only reservoir in Las Animas County. In Wyoming’s Cloud Peak Wilderness, a survey reported in 2018 found abundant splake approaching 18 in (46 cm) in Romeo Lake, one of the lakes stocked by helicopter. Your state’s stocking report names the current waters.

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 do you 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. Follow them deeper as the water warms, with small minnow-imitating plugs, spoons, spinners and jigs. Through the ice they are easy to catch, in Maine’s own words: ice-fishing returns in one study water ran as high as 78% of the splake stocked.

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 a small spoon or jig tipped with a minnow, or set a live minnow under a tip-up. Ontario lists small minnows, jigs and spoons among splake baits and calls splake a good ice-fishing catch.

When Wisconsin ended splake stocking in Lake Superior in 2025, one charter captain there put the loss plainly. Splake are a near-shore fish, he said, easier for the sport fisherman to catch and far more available to anyone in a small boat or on the ice.

How big do splake get?

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. In one study water splake survived to age four, where stocked brook trout rarely lived past one. Maine’s netting data from waters stocked with both:

Age	Brook trout	Splake
1	9.5 in (24 cm)	11.4 in (29 cm)
2	12.1 in (31 cm)	13.4 in (34 cm)
3	13.8 in (35 cm)	16.6 in (42 cm)
4	15.4 in (39 cm)	19.4 in (49 cm)
5–8	none sampled	22.8–26.0 in (58–66 cm)

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. It now manages about 53 waters primarily for them, and 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.

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 May 17, 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.

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. On most of those waters a 12 in or higher minimum length lets the fish grow 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.

Can splake reproduce?

Yes, and that makes them unusual. Many 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. It cited its genetic guidelines and a lake trout population that now sustains itself, and planned to raise brown trout stocking by 30–40% to fill the gap. The trout hub covers every trout and char in North America.

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