Anglers in East Tennessee have reason to rejoice at the opportunity to fish a trout that has been off limits for 30 years. Representatives for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park announced recently that the park would allow the fishing of the brook trout.

The brook trout is the only native trout to the mountains and has endured competition for resources from more well-known and larger rainbow and brown trout, Bob Miller, park spokesperson, said Monday.

Miller said that the “brookies” are a special breed of trout.

“Pound for pound, they’re a scrappy little fish,” he said. “[They have] bright orange and gold color on their bellies, and they’re called speckled trout because they have an almost bull’s-eye shape on them.”

The trout are smaller than their rainbow and brown cousins, at about 7 inches, the minimum size needed for fishers to keep them, or smaller, he said. The fish were pushed south during the last ice age and dominate about 150 miles of the 700 miles of streams and rivers available for fishing in the park.

Biologists in the 1970s were concerned that brook trout were being pushed out of their native waters by rainbow and brown trout and their numbers were being depleted because of fishing, Miller said. The recourse that biologists proposed was to close the trout to fishing. With more recent studies and experiments, they’ve found that they can compete with the rainbow and brown trout.

The lure to anglers, Miller said, is the fact that the “brookies” are the only native fish to the mountains.

“I think anglers recognize that. Some of them are real purists, and they appreciate that.”

Moreover, he said, the environment in the Smoky Mountains provides anglers a great background against which to do what they love.

“The art of fishing is more about the experience than the fish,” he said.

One of the park’s biologists agreed with Miller.

“Mostly, there’s a couple of reasons why they want to fish for them … It’s part of their heritage, this is their native environment,” Matt Kulp, fisheries biologist for the park, said Monday.

In experiments that the park conducted to determine whether opening up the brook trout to fishing would damage their population numbers, anglers were allowed to fish them and provide feedback about their experience.

“They were there more for the opportunity to catch them than to harvest fish,” Kulp said.

The trout will be open for fishing beginning April 15.