Bodies in Landscapes: Entanglements of trout and waters in South Africa

Abstract

In post-apartheid South Africa, landscape morphologies give clues to how scholars can read landscapes as historically layered, ongoing more-than-human projects. This article explores how starting with the forms of rivers and the bodies of trout can further enrich ongoing conversations in the environmental humanities and social sciences about the structures of multispecies assemblages. Trout, a fish in South Africa with roots in British colonialism, have earth-forming effects because rivers and stillwaters with trout in them, and the landscapes they flow through, are managed differently from rivers and stillwaters without trout. Yet these same rivers also come to remake trout, as white South Africans cultivate fish bodies to fit their landscape ideals. Trout, however, are not fully mutable, as they carry other landscape histories in their bodies. The trout at the heart of this paper were introduced from North-Western America, and their bodies are indelibly shaped by histories of geology, glaciation, and management in that region. As white South African fly fishermen work to make what they see as beautiful local trout, they raise crucial questions about which fish are considered a good “fit” for South African rivers and who gets to decide. Through this case, we probe how fish morphologies and landscape morphologies exist in complex, interdependent and interactive ways that offer new insights into ongoing conversations about wilderness, nature, belonging, colonial relations, as well as dispossession and the racialisation of landscapes. Examining these topics through attention to the relations of fish and water bodies, we explore how landscapes are always at the intersection of colonial histories and multispecies relations.

Introduction

Organismal bodies are both influenced by and influence the environments – the landscapes, the waterscapes – in which they evolve. In considering the relationship between organisms and environments, evolutionary biologists use a concept called “ecological fitness” to describe how well a being matches the world it inhabits. In this article, we focus on fitness as a way to consider how we might study more-than-human landscapes, not only through attention to species interactions within a given landscape patch, but also through organismal bodies themselves. What might be the benefits of approaching landscapes through bodies? And how might we do so in practice?

We argue that such an approach, combined with an attention to fitness, offers an important perspective for the study of Anthropocene landscapes and bodies, which are shaped by new geographical connectivities. In classic ecological thinking, organisms and landscapes co-evolve primarily through place-situated dynamics. But in a time when anthropogenic processes are coming to play ever-stronger roles in shaping evolutionary trajectories, it is essential to reconsider the geographies and connections that come to shape organisms and ecological assemblages. Rather than viewing evolution and ecological change as primarily emergent from local adaptive processes, we suggest that it is important to consider how human practices create new evolutionary geographies, in which spatially distant places can come to play major roles. Focusing on organismal bodies, we argue, is especially useful for highlighting these dynamics, as doing so allows us to trace the spatially complicated landscapes in relation to which they are evolving. This focus, in turn, allows us better to understand the discontinuous structure and long-distance dynamics of Anthropocene landscapes marked by intentional species introductions.

We unfold the possibilities of this approach via attention to a specific group of organisms, a population of rainbow trout that was introduced from North America to South Africa's Eastern Cape region in the late nineteenth century. After a combination of active breeding and place-specific selective pressures, these fish are now seen as “a perfect fit” for the region by South African trout aficionados, despite the fact that the fish generally have to be restocked into waters annually as they cannot breed in stillwaters or in rivers which are too warm or lack suitable gravel substrate. By attending to the North American landscapes within which the trout evolved, those of South Africa's Eastern Cape, those of Britain and other iconic fishing sites that animate the understandings and desires of South African trout lovers, and the morphologies of fish themselves, we explore how simultaneous attention to bodies of water and fish can help us to see how multiple landscapes and multiple definitions of ecological “fitness” come to interact with each other in important, but also problematic, ways. We intentionally play with and expand the established concept of ecological fitness to examine how biological processes of adaptation come to be fundamentally entangled with ideas – colonial and sporting – about what kind of fish “ought” to be in a landscape. In doing so, we examine the practices of breeding fish to “fit” the local landscape, which are linked to trout fishing histories in nineteenth-century Britain, to contemporary transnational sport-fishing imaginaries, and South African adaptations of these. At the same time, we are also attentive to the effects that creating land-water-scapes for introduced trout has on wider ecological relations, and the aggregations of other species (birds, mammals, insects) that they both exclude and attract. Because trout were introduced to South Africa in the late nineteenth century, our primary temporal focus is from that time forward, but we are also explicitly interested in how these come to interface with the deep time geomorphological histories of the rivers into which trout are introduced.

Trout, the relatively small group of people who fly fish for them, and the ecological effects they generate together may seem like a marginal issue compared to many other environmental problems facing South Africa and the world. But we suggest that the landscape dynamics of this case are in many ways emblematic of major and ongoing ecological changes toward increasingly anthropogenic and geographically complex assemblages. Our focus on these particular trout is inspired by our larger collaborative research initiative, Global trout: investigating environmental change through more-than-human world systems, a Norwegian Research Council-funded project that examines the widespread introduction of rainbow and brown trout as an entry point for exploring how anthropological scholarship on scale can help us rethink the “global” of global environmental problems. Distributed to all corners of the world as part of European colonial efforts, introduced trout have reconfigured ecologies and social formations in each location they have come to live albeit in remarkably different ways. Our interdisciplinary project – which brings together scholars with backgrounds in anthropology, literary and cultural studies, aquatic ecology, fisheries biology, and sociology – examines trout worlds in the UK, Japan, South Africa, Argentina, and New Zealand, with the aim of: (1) documenting histories of colonial trout introductions; and (2) exploring how people and other species currently live with the effects of introduced trout. In doing so, the project – like this article – emphasises the role of various translocal dynamics in place-specific assemblages and processes.

The fieldwork for this article was undertaken by the first and second author, who led the Global Trout project's South Africa research, between 2018 and 2023. This work consisted of visits to hatcheries, archival research and attendance at public meetings with trout producers. In addition, these two authors interviewed fly-fishing guides, provincial officials, NGO officials and trout producers. The third author visited several of the South African sites in 2023, as part of a 2-week collective field trip, and has undertaken transnational work on trout introductions since 2018.

Within the context of this special issue, we intend for our empirical description of South African trout to highlight the analytical possibilities of attention to organismal bodies for the study of multispecies landscapes. As this special issue highlights, the multispecies turn in anthropology, human geography, and the environmental humanities more broadly has brought renewed attention to landscapes as key objects of analysis (see the introduction to the special issue). Like several other articles in this issue (esp. Caple et al. and Tsing et al.), our article draws inspiration for its approach to landscape not only from humanities and social sciences traditions, but also from the natural sciences. In the past decade, concepts from landscape ecology, including “patches” and “patch dynamics,” have inspired anthropologists and environmental humanities scholars to direct their focus to questions of how multispecies relations unfold in specific places (Caple, 2017; Tsing et al., 2019). We further this practice of sustained and substantial engagement with biological concepts while directing our focus toward the adjacent concept of “fitness.” In dialogue with the movement within multispecies studies to position natural scientists as collaborators (e.g., Nustad and Swanson, 2022; Swanson, 2017; Tsing, 2013) rather than as objects of study, ¹ we consider fitness as a robust concept developed through the research of colleagues, rather than as a metaphor. At the same time, we are not wholly faithful to its conventional usage, stretching its boundaries to show how interactions between humanities scholarship and the natural sciences can generate productive reflections across disciplinary divides.

Fitness is particularly important here, because when we follow its analytical lead, it takes us into the materiality of organismal bodies, where the spatial and temporal relations of being/landscape relations are cast into sharp relief via their imprints in bodily form (Mathews, 2022; Tsing, 2013). When we do so, we see not only imprints of geophysical contexts and relationships with other nonhumans, but also those of colonial relations, racialized violence, gendered dynamics, and other political-economic processes. We thus intend for our in-depth consideration of fitness to contribute to the extensive and expanding literatures on colonial and imperial landscape transformation, especially those explicitly focused on the transformation of river- and waterscapes (Harzard, 2022; Lavau, 2011; Mitchell, 1991; O’Gorman and Morgan, 2021; Todd, 2018; Worster, 1992) and on the ecologies of settler colonialism in Africa (Enns and Bersaglio, 2024).

Focusing on fitness also positions us to contribute to methodological debates in anthropology and the environmental humanities about how to study large-scale ecological changes via field-based case studies. This article's attention to the specificities of South African trout waters is inspired by emerging approaches that use ethnographic-natural historical field methods within a small walkable site, or what some scholars have termed “rubber boots methods,” to emphasise the importance of staying with and working from a grounded place (Bubandt et al., 2022).

We begin by discussing the concept of ecological fitness and the way it needs to be modified to encompass the drawing together of landscapes and imaginaries that take place in creating a fish that fits a specific environment. After describing the different landscapes involved, as well as how the rainbow trout literally came to embody these, we turn to the effects that fish bodies have on the landscapes where they are introduced, arguing that as landscapes shape fish bodies, fish bodies shape landscapes as well in important ways. Lastly, we explore the implications that our focus on fish bodies, ecological fitness and landscapes have for contemporary discussions about landscapes and ecologies in the Anthropocene.

What is ecological fitness?

Fitness has been a key concept in evolutionary biology since the inception of the field. After reading Darwin's On the Origin of Species (Darwin, 2019 (1859)), Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” as a synonym for what Darwin had termed “natural selection.” While social evolution and human racial thinking have often led the concept to be interpreted in deeply problematic ways, for contemporary biologists fitness does not imply the survival of the most brawny, aggressive, or “superior,” but rather gestures toward the alignment or disjuncture between an organism and the set of landscape relations within which it lives (Ginnobili, 2016; Peacock, 2011). Today, biologists see fitness, broadly speaking, as the ability of a species or subspecies to maintain an ongoing presence in a particular context. Although reproductive success remains central, it is no longer viewed as the only component of fitness: there is widespread recognition that non-reproductive members of a species, and acts other than reproduction, are essential for how creatures maintain successful species-lives. This means that fitness cannot be reduced to an individualistic ability to “compete” for food and mates, but also includes abilities for cooperation and mutualism within and across species (including humans), and an ability to construct or modify one's surroundings. Although the definition of fitness remains an area of active research and lively debate, as the reasons for survival at the level of the species and individual are not always obvious, one recent article summarises fitness as “those properties of organisms that are explanatory of survival in the broadest sense, not merely descriptive of reproductive success … fitness in this sense is ecological in that it is defined by the interactions between organisms and environments” (Peacock, 2011). In other words, fitness – in ecology – speaks to alignments of forms, of bodies and landscapes as they co-constitute each other.

In the following sections, we take seriously both this biological definition of fitness and the claims of fitness put forth by South African trout lovers – paying attention to precisely how and why their assessments of the fitness of trout differ from the classical definition of fitness. In doing so, we have two aims. First, we seek to demonstrate the value in reading landscape histories from fish morphology. This move is inspired by biological approaches to morphology, in which it refers to an organism's bodily form and structure. For biologists, attention to morphology is fundamental for examining how interactions with other organisms and with physical environments have shaped an organism's evolution. Biologists also examine morphology as they consider a given species’ affordances and possibilities for life under various conditions. In drawing on, yet expanding this definition, we propose that giving attention to fish bodies helps us better to see the jumbling of landscapes that happens as transcontinental connections increasingly shape ecological transformations. Second, we also hope to foreground how basic ecological concepts are transfigured within landscapes that are becoming increasingly anthropogenic. In the twenty-first century, ecological fitness is becoming ever-more complicated – and in need of interdisciplinary analysis – as the animals that “fit” are increasingly those that mesh with the landscapes generated by specific human projects. Animals increasingly “fit” because they thrive in or at the edges of urban spaces (e.g., coyotes and crows) or because they become intertwined with desires that gain political traction, such as economic gain (e.g., industrial farm animal production) or upper and middle-class recreation (e.g., trout). In our analysis, we thus intentionally broaden the meaning of fitness to encompass the ways in which species fit human imaginaries – economic, aesthetic and/or recreational – and come to reshape ecologies. These reshaped ecologies, we argue, generate new contexts, characterised by a jumbling of histories, geographies, and relations, which call for us to reconsider fitness itself. To illustrate the importance of this extended notion of ecological fitness, we turn to our encounters with trout in South Africa's Eastern Cape province.

The fit of Davies's fish

The Waterfall is a place that two of the authors, Knut and Duncan, have visited many times, and which we both frequently revisit in memory. It has become a kind of shorthand between us. We know that if one of us throws “The Waterfall” into a conversation, it will immediately evoke the beauties, complexities, frustrations, and paradoxes of flyfishing for trout in South Africa, or many of the other locales to which they were historically transported. Our different histories – Duncan is a white South African; Knut is a white Norwegian, though with a research interest in South Africa – mean our takes on the fish we catch in the large pool at the base of those falls, and their histories, may differ; but however far our ideas range, they keep coming back to The Waterfall and all that it embodies.

Surrounded by thousands of dry square kilometres of Karoo scrubland, The Waterfall itself is hard to comprehend, in the mind more like a glimpsed mirage of water on the baking tar road to Somerset East than an actual locale. Let alone the rainbow trout, thousands of kilometres across an ocean from their native waters in the mountain ranges along the West Coast of North America.

The first you see of it is a gash of red sandstone as you climb up from the scrublands surrounding Somerset East, on a dirt road that takes you almost to the top of the escarpment overlooking the town. The falls themselves drop ninety metres into a pool from which runs a small stream, ducking its way around huge boulders and edged with lush vegetation. The tree canopy intermittently blocks out the sun, and the water runs clear and cold. And there are trout, skittish in the extreme, beautiful in the net, and lively on the line.

Our guide is Alan Hobson, de facto custodian of the trout waters around Somerset East, and a professional flyfishing guide. Despite years of guiding clients, his passion for trout remains infectious. “Now isn’t that the perfect fish for this environment?”, he asks of a particularly beautiful specimen that has fallen to Knut's dry fly, dropped gently into the bubble line pushed up by the falling water. The fish is jewel-like in colouration, with a faint pink blush at the throat and red brushstrokes on the fins, and does indeed seem to embody the wonder of the place.

But the apparent innocence of that question is also misleading. The trout are there in the first place because Alan has driven several hundred kilometres to Makhanda (previously known as Grahamstown), to collect trout fry hatched by the ichthyologist Martin Davies. He has then backpacked them into the gorge in a bucket and carefully stocked each pool. Unlike most other river trout in South Africa, these ones cannot breed as the conditions are not conducive, so their continued presence is the work of Alan and his bucket. Add to this the fact that the fish are the product of very careful breeding over some decades by Martin Davies. Each fish we catch, of course, embodies a triumph of cunning and instinct against almost impossible odds (flood, drought, predators, water-level and temperature fluctuations). Their hatchery origins notwithstanding, in almost every other way, Alan's response is right. They do seem perfect for this environment. Somewhere in the paradox of the sheer enchantment of fishing for free rising trout and the arduous annual labour of carrying the bucket of fry upstream lies the story of trout in South Africa, with the fish themselves sometimes directing the narrative.

Alan Hobson's view that these fish are perfectly adapted to their environment is shared by Martin Davies, who has run his own hatchery and refined these fish for the last 30 years (Brown, 2025). The fish, Davies says, are so well suited to this landscape because they have been bred for specific physical and aesthetic characteristics: rapid growth, the ability to withstand warmer water temperatures, wide tails, deep bodies, strong basal structure, and what he terms the “Kamloops hump,” developed musculature in the shoulder area. The hens have crimson bands along their bright silver flanks, continuing onto the gill plate. Their fins have a yellow or reddish hue, with white tips. The cock fish are equally beautiful, with hooked jaws and strong maroon colouration in spawning seasons and a blush of red at the throat, which Davies thinks is the result of a reactivation of a recessive cutthroat gene ² (Brown, 2025: 417).

When Knut showed the authorship team pictures of the fish from the waterfall pool, which closely match the description above, Heather, who has grown up with North American rainbows, was intrigued by their distinctive markings: “These must be Kamloops”, she exclaimed, noting their extraordinarily close resemblance to a strain of trout originating in British Columbia, but also now found in multiple sites across the U.S. and elsewhere.

So, what are Kamloops strain rainbow trout, originating in British Columbia, Canada, doing in a river on the edge of the Karoo in South Africa? The landscapes could hardly be more different. British Columbia, while consisting of distinct climatic zones, has cold winter temperatures in most places along with chilly water temperatures and relatively stable flows year-round. In contrast, the region surrounding The Waterfall is semi-arid with very little vegetation and endless windmills erected to extract ground water in a place where rivers often dry up. And why did both the guide and Davies think the trout were such a “perfect fit” for this landscape? And if they are right, what does it mean that these fish are – morphologically speaking – a good fit for this complex and contradictory landscape?

Kamloops trout

Heather was indeed correct: Davies's fish are rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss), descended mainly from a strain widely known as Kamloops, whose evolution is closely tied to geologic and ecological histories sited thousands of miles away from the Eastern Cape waterfall. ³ Also called Gerrard trout, the Kamloops stock has its origins in British Columbia's Kootenay Lake, where they have been widely revered by sports fishermen for their large size, curvaceous form, and vivid red markings. As renowned salmonid biologist and avid fisher Robert J. Behnke phrased it in a Trout Magazine column, Like rare estate wine, it is a fish for special occasions.’ ⁴

The fish embody a special geomorphologic history. Prior to the Pleistocene, their ancestors were probably anadromous fish that migrated to and from the Pacific Ocean like salmon, via North America's large Columbia River. But during the Pleistocene, which ended about 11,700 years ago, massive ice sheets first covered then retreated from this region, creating huge hydrological changes: glacial outburst floods and massive landslides carved new river channels, cut off once connected waters, and created new cold-water lakes. In the midst of such landscape turbulence, the trout – along with some salmon cousins – appear to have become landlocked in Kootenay Lake. While most rainbow trout eat insects, the Kamloops learned to prey on the young of the landlocked salmon with whom they shared the lake. With this fattier and more calory rich food source, they were able to grow rapidly and achieve weights of up to 25 pounds per fish, far exceeding the five to eight pounds more typical for trout. The words of a contemporary sportfishing writer illustrate the intense attraction of these fish for recreational anglers: “Kamloops trout are shaped like oversized chinook salmon, football-like, with fat, humped backs, small heads, and massive tails. They sport a red hue along their sides and have dark backs and bellies. They are, in a word, one of the most gorgeous freshwater fish you'll ever see.” ⁵

From BC to South Africa

To understand how Kamloops trout ended up in South Africa, it is important to consider how trout – in general – ended up there, as there were originally no trout or salmon at all in the Southern Hemisphere. But from the middle of the 1860s onwards, trout, both rainbow and brown, were spread throughout the British empire from their origins in North America and Europe. Trout were first successfully introduced to the Southern Hemisphere when Australian and New Zealand waters were stocked in April 1864. Inspired by this achievement, the Cape Colonial Government passed a bill “for encouraging the introduction into the waters of this colony of fishes not native to such waters” in 1867, and in 1873, Mr AR Campbell-Johnston shipped a consignment of brown trout eggs that were to be shared between the Cape and the Natal colonies. All of these eggs died, but from the 1890s onwards, British settlers figured out how to transport ova across the equator, hatch a cold-water fish in the high temperatures of South African waters, and place the young fish in river environments where they had some chance of survival (Brown, 2013; Nustad et al., 2024).

An enormous amount of time and energy went into translocating trout, a fish that first and foremost was important for sport. ⁶ To understand this obsession with trout, it is necessary to understand the fish's significance in nineteenth-century Britain. The new British bourgeoisie adopted field sports, such as hunting and fly fishing, as a way to emulate aristocratic practices and as a marker of class (Huggins, 2008). Proper conduct in field sports came to define the English gentleman and to be an essential part of a particular masculinity that bound identity formation to landscape-linked hobbies. The gender and class dimensions of fly-fishing have been widely noted. For example, Douglas (2003) argues that trout in Britain have long been referred to as “he” regardless of sex, because British masculine narratives seek to cast trout as an equal who chooses voluntarily to take the fly and engage in gentlemanly combat with the fisherman. The social distinctions created in English fly fishing also had a material basis: Only upper-class gentlemen had the means to join a fishing club with access to a chalk stream, and enough free time on their hands to cultivate a fly-fishing hobby. Douglas gives the example of how the protagonists in Walter Scott's St Ronan's Well finally decide, after watching an unknown man fish, that the stranger they have been observing is a gentleman worthy of inclusion and possible friendship: “The squire has seen him casting twelve yards of line with one hand, and says: ‘… the fly fell like a thistledown on the water’. Such skill settled the delicate social question, and he shortly received three separate invitations to join the exclusive party” (Douglas, 2003: 176).

As a hobby, fly fishing emerged along the banks of England's chalk streams, with particular aesthetics around what makes for a proper trout, including muscular form and beautiful markings. These trout worlds were made possible by new techniques such as hatchery production of trout and the modification of land and riverscapes to suit trout fishing. These techniques, in particular hatchery production, also made possible the spread of trout throughout the British Empire, with profound consequences for the landscapes into which trout were introduced (Nustad et al., 2024).

The connection to English trout worlds is apparent in the writings of South Africa's first inland fisheries officer, Sydney Hey, who in his memoirs describes his transformation from a boy interested in fishing to a trout fanatic in the early 1920s. He had been posted to King William's Town where he met Gant, a Scottish immigrant, and together they took up fly fishing for trout. After ordering fly fishing tackle from England, they spent hours practising before they each managed to catch a trout. Then, as the season closed, they sought ways of learning more:

Gant was thorough and capable in all he did; so, when our fishing ended for the season, he set about improving our knowledge of trout and trout fishing, as far as this could be done by means of books and fishing tackle catalogues. In addition to Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler, he bought Sir Edward Grey's Fly Fishing which, by the way, I consider the best book ever written on trout and sea trout fishing, Sheringham's An Open Creel – a most charming book – E. M. Tod's Wet Fly Fishing, W. C. Stewart's The Practical Angler, A. Ronald's The Fly Fisher's Entomology, which, although it dealt with insect life in English waters only, taught me quite a lot about our ephemera and nymphal life in general. This knowledge stood me in very good stead in after years. Two other good books he also got were J. C. Mottram's Fly Fishing, which is chock full of useful information, and G. E. M. Skues’ The Way of a Trout with the Fly. Some of these books dealt only with dry fly fishing, which is an art seldom practised in South Africa; nevertheless, the knowledge we gained from our studies of them was put to practical use whenever the opportunity rose. (Hey, 2006: 39)

In short, to learn how to fly fish for trout in South Africa, the men turned to classic texts from England, where – at the time – the sport was still deeply tied to its Victorian origin as one of the field sports, developed on the chalk streams of the country's southern grand estates. As with many Victorian practices, fly fishing was entangled in classed ideas about proper “gentlemanly” conduct about the right way to fish, including only targeting actively rising fish (as the most worthy opponents), only using floating flies (as distinct from the sub surface worm fishing of the lower classes) and only targeting game fish, such as trout (in contrast to coarse fish such as pike). Such commitments came together in the relatively codified technique of fly fishing, with the social meanings evident in the quote from Douglas above (see Nustad, 2018).

While the basic techniques of the sport remained relatively stable, these English trout imaginaries were also modified as they were introduced to new landscapes. As Draper (2003, 2006) has argued, one of the motivations for bringing trout to places such as South Africa was to break the tie to class and privilege fly fishing had in Britain. Clerks such as Hey were given access to a sport they would not have been able to perform at home. This partial democratisation of fly fishing went hand in hand with forms of dispossession for many Black people who lost access to waters, once these were declared trout waters (Nustad, 2024; Nustad et al., 2024)

Fly fishing in South Africa today is in one sense a continuation of this beginning, but as Brown points out in Are Trout South African? (2013), ideas about trout and flyfishing are both shaped by the huge international flyfishing tourism industry and by specific South African adaptations. For instance, as we saw, the insistence on restrictive fishing methods such as fly fishing only, which emulated the British Victorian bourgeoisie, went hand in hand with access to fly fishing for the general white public that was less restrictive than it would have been in England. South African fly fishing today draws from North American, British, and other European traditions to create a style of fly fishing that one could argue is uniquely South African (Brown, 2013). Some of these elements are adaptations to the world making abilities of trout and how trout relate to their South African environments. For example, because of the composition of insect life and the temperature of the waters, trout tend to get most of their food from below the surface, rather from hatching insects on the surface. The classic English obsession with floating flies and dry fly fishing is therefore not as prominent in South Africa, whereas newer European wet fly techniques, such as Czech nymphing and Euro nymphing, are widely embraced.

This context also influences imaginaries of fish and hence ideas about what trout fit South African environments. While some trout on English chalk streams are conditioned to take food on the surface through being fed floating pellets to create the perfect rising surface feeding trout, trout in most South African waters tend to be valued for their strength and explosiveness, which is how you will experience them when they take a fly you cannot see. There are also alternative ideas about fitness that stem from specific South African conditions. While big fish are valued both in South Africa and elsewhere, there is also a recognition of the hardship that trout face in southern warm waters manifest in an appreciation of small, well-proportioned and brightly coloured fish caught within narrow, low-flow streams. South African fly-fishing magazines are full of pictures of small, beautiful fish caught in mountain streams, something you will rarely see elsewhere. Here, beautiful colours and the ability to adapt and survive in a hostile environment, rather than size and strength, are what constitute a fish that is a good fit for this environment.

Until the mid-1980s, when international discourses on biodiversity and concerns about alien species gained force, trout were among the most protected species in South Africa, with strict catch limits, closed seasons, and fly fishing only. The main state conservation authorities, responsible for looking after the many protected areas and national parks in South Africa, had the management of trout fisheries as one of their main responsibilities. But from the mid-1980s onwards, the state withdrew from trout management and production, leaving room for people like Martin Davies to experiment with trout breeding, seeking to produce fish that they believed would be a perfect fit for the environments into which they were stocked.

MTD genetics: making “fit”

It is within this longer historical context that Davies introduced the Kamloops trout to the Eastern Cape in the late 1980s. Davies explained that his breeding project was inspired by his observations at the state-sponsored trout hatchery at Pirie, situated just outside King William's Town. He noted that the fish in some of the ponds grew far more quickly than those in the others, and he discovered that these were Kamloops rainbow trout. These fish gained weight and length far more rapidly than any other strains of trout in the hatchery, but they were also less tolerant of the warm South African waters. The Kamloops would be the first to die when summer water temperatures rose above 20 degrees C. But he also noted that there were some fish in the hatchery, Shasta rainbows originating from California, that would survive a hot summer which killed all the other trout. The Shastas, however, lacked the growth potential of the Kamloops (Brown, 2025: 415–417).

Davies thus set out to make fish that would have the allure of the Kamloops, but that would survive in warmer temperatures – his sense of a fish that would “fit” the landscape. He started to cross breed the Kamloops and Shasta rainbow strains to produce fish with good growth potential and the ability to survive warmer water temperatures. More than three decades of very careful selection and cross breeding followed, with new genetic material introduced at key points to ensure sufficient variation in the subsequent spawnings. The fish that we caught at the Waterfall are the descendants of these trout which have, Davies says – punning on his own initials – MTD genetics (Brown, 2025: 416–17).

The fish behave as you would expect fish born in this place to behave. They avoid exposing themselves in the sun. They know where the food will be. But they are not able to reproduce in these waters. For that, the temperature is simply too high, despite the Shasta genes. In addition, the substrate of the riverbed lacks gravel suitable for breeding. Our fishing guide says that the trout try to spawn nevertheless, changing colour and the males developing hooked spawning jaws, called kypes. Because they cannot reproduce in this region's streams, the Kamloops descendent trout must be produced in hatcheries, then repeatedly stocked into local waters. Yet despite the time, money, and effort required, the region's fly-fishing enthusiasts continue such activities because, as they say, they love the fish and have a real passion for fishing. They yearn for trout that “fit” their image of what a good fly-fishing fish should be – an image that comes not only from their own experiences fishing around the world and from their avid consumption of fishing films, blogs, and magazines, but also, as we have seen, from the historical origin of their pastime itself.

Although the MTD fish are “made” in Davies's hatchery and are – in the words of one historian – “an entirely synthetic fish” (Halverson, 2010), Davies does not in fact create these fish alone. A key agent in the making of these fish is Thrift Dam, into which Davies stocks the fish as fry. Located some three hours’ drive away from Makhanda, Thrift Dam is a vast body of water in the Winterberg mountains near Tarkastad in South Africa, renowned – since Davies's involvement – as possibly the stillwater in the country for trophy fish reaching well into double figures. It is located on the Swart Kei river at an altitude of 1700 metres above sea level, and when full measures in the region of 160 hectares. ⁷ Its bleak appearance rather belies its productivity as a stillwater. It is surrounded by scrubby grassland on which cattle and sheep graze, though various antelope species are also in evidence, and the wind howls almost constantly. Only the lines of weedbed and beaches of washed-up snail shells hint at the prolific aquatic life beneath its surface.

Because Thrift is home to very large trout, otters, fish eagles, crabs, frogs, and large dragonfly nymphs, the very small fish that Davies stocks in the stillwater face a slim chance of survival. But the rich supply of food means that those that do survive emerge as large, powerful (and beautiful) adults. In July each year, Davies and several volunteers (including Alan Hobson of Wild Trout Fishing in the Karoo) gather at Thrift to net fish and strip them of eggs and milt for hatching in his own hatchery or the hatchery at Ventnor farm near Thrift. Davies uses the fish that have survived against the overwhelming odds in Thrift as the brood stock to spawn further generations – both for Thrift and beyond. The unique predatory and evolutionary pressures of this stillwater, where Davies keeps his brood fish, are thus also central in the formation of these trout as such.

The agency of Thrift, Davies explains, has become more and more significant over the years, as he places less significance on matching the “right” milt with the “right” ova. Instead, he lets the ecology of the Thrift make the selection. In addition to the predators in Thrift, the fry are shaped by multiple factors such as air and water temperatures, chemical make-up, nutrient load, wind, soil or rock type, and various water weeds. Fly fishers recognise this agency of waters when they say that “Thrift produces big fish”.

Landscape effects

As we began by noting, at the same time that fish bodies are shaped by the landscapes they inhabit, fish bodies shape the landscapes in which they live. One way in which they do so has been well documented by research on alien species introductions. Scientific research points to the various effects that introduced trout can have on the waters into which they are transplanted. Depending on the aquatic environment, they can prey on smaller indigenous species, displace native fish, compete with them for food, alter nutrition regimes, and change the structure of the insect ecosystems of the waters they inhabit (Shelton, 2013). Other scientists argue that the co-existence of trout and indigenous species, like witvis, galaxias, redfins, and yellowfish, suggests that their influence is less dramatic, that any ecological damage occurred many decades ago, and that a kind of ecological equilibrium has since been established (Alletson, 2018; Crass, 1986).

But trout also shape landscapes in ways that far exceed these direct effects and the kinds of changes typically captured by invasion biologists and ecologists. This is because water worlds with trout in them are managed differently from water worlds without trout. The Waterfall and the Naude river where we fished is a protected area, and access to it is through the purchase of permits. These permits protect some forms of nature: a host of indigenous plants such as wild olives, agapanthus, watsonias, and cape chestnuts, as well as kudu, nyala, reedbuck, martial and black eagles, baboons, and leopards, in addition to trout. In an important sense, then, an introduced alien fish, embodying imaginaries and landscapes from far away, helps create a South African landscape characterised by its rich biodiversity.

The Waterfall is not unique. We see similar landscape effects across the region of South Africa on which we focus. Countless ponds have been made and rivers managed specifically to maintain trout. Some waters have been specifically created for trout (and so, in a sense, by them): dams, ponds, or weirs on rivers otherwise too small to accommodate any fish beyond a few centimetres. Descriptions from rangers in the Giants Cup National Park of the Drakensberg during the apartheid years, for instance, tell of labour to protect game from Black poachers, attempts at exterminating wild dogs by the use of imported hunting dogs and horses, inspired by English fox hunts, and the use of dynamite to create holding waters for trout in rivers (Hughes, 2014). Many trout rivers throughout the country similarly have their dynamite pools. Other landscape effects are more complex. On the huge White-owned cattle farms in the Underberg area, there is less erosion and damage to rivers from cattle trampling riverbeds than in other areas, because these are trout rivers. As part of the management of trout, cattle are kept away from riverbanks, usually by fences, thereby also halting erosion, and in turn protecting other species such as waterfowl, otters, dragonfly nymphs, frogs, tadpoles, and numerous aquatic insects.

The landscapes that trout help shape are frequently protected areas and parks, or private property such as farms, resorts, or syndicates. While this may have benefits for some species, as is well documented by political ecologists, this world also excludes other natures and bodies (Barrett et al., 2013; Brooks, 2005). As other research has shown, in South Africa, the creation of protected areas, the propagation of trout, and the exclusion of Black people from landscapes go hand in hand (Nustad, 2024). South African trout landscapes are transnational spaces, marked by human and more-than-human violences and erasures, that have been created through colonial dispossessions and are sustained by current fishing passions that are fundamentally entangled with yet also in excess of them.

Landscapes in fish bodies

As our case illustrates, closely examining the morphology of these South Africa-resident trout simultaneously gives us cues to four landscapes:

British Columbia's Kamloops and its cold water.

California and its Shasta rainbows.

South Africa and its warm waters, different food sources, and breeding conditions.

Landscapes of fly-fishing desire, linking Britain to the British colonies from the 1860s onwards, as well as to global landscapes of the ideal fly-fishing trout.

But, as we also have seen, these global trends, like the trout themselves, have been adapted to South African conditions by the world making abilities of trout, and the human fishing culture that has evolved to fish for them. This drawing together of landscapes is not unique to our case. As many scholars have noted, places – including their ecological assemblages – are often translocal (Massey, 2007; Swanson, 2015, 2022; Tsing, 2005). A wide range of humanities and social science scholarship has demonstrated how, since the fifteenth century, intentional species transfers have been an integral part of European expansion (Crosby, 1973; Grove, 1996). Natural scientists have increasingly paid attention to such dynamics, and have documented how histories of European empire have directly shaped the world's patterns of flora, fauna, and fungi (Lenzner et al., 2022). With the sharp increases in shipping since the Second World War, the number of unintentional species introductions has also grown markedly (Friis and Nielsen, 2017).

As our case also shows, at the same time that species introductions are important, they are not the only way that transnational connections have come to remake ecologies. As commodity chains have come to link geographically distant places, we see that desires, policies, and practices in one area can shape the ecologies of another. Such dynamics are illustrated, for example, by the ways that Japanese construction companies’ desires for cheap timber have affected Southeast Asian forests (Dauvergne, 1997), or that European supermarket demands have shaped agricultural practices in parts of Africa (Freidberg, 2004). Natural scientists have also noted the power of such connections, as they increasingly explore “telecoupling,” a concept they use to describe socio-ecological relations that take place across long distances (Liu et al., 2013). One similarity across wide swathes of the social and natural sciences is an attention to how dynamics of exports/imports, resource extraction, and economic pressures affect ecological changes.

Our work contributes to and intervenes in these multiple and wide-ranging debates in two ways. First, by drawing attention to the ways that ongoing processes of telecoupling are not merely driven by economic desires, but also by desires of sport and self-making. As our case illustrates, such desires and the landscape dynamics they foster are deeply shaped by colonial histories even as they also sometimes exceed them. Second, we have explored how the formation of landscapes via multiple transnational connections might be productively examined through the concept of “fitness,” as we seek to stay with the place-based sensibilities of patchy Anthropocene and rubber boots methods, while also creating a space for more in-depth attention to long-distance relations as a major landscape dynamic.

As we have noted, we see the concept of fitness as especially useful here, as its emphasis on the relationship between organisms and their environments allows us to unfold the multiple landscapes with which a given being is in relation. Following mainstream biology, we see fitness as linked to morphology – physical form – along with behavioural and physiological traits. Yet bringing an anthropological and cultural perspective to fish bodies shows us that there are indeed three landscapes – which interact and impact each other – inside Davies's fish. They also show us that, through Davies's fish, the three distant landscapes become tied together in new ways, in turn shaping the landscapes themselves (Swanson, 2015).

This empirical work allows us to ask: To what landscape are Davies's trout a good fit? Davies wants to make trout that “fit” – that are perfect for – the landscapes where he lives in South Africa. But is this possible when trout evolved in very different kinds of rivers with cooler waters and different substrates? In one sense, a trout that fits with South African landscapes would not be a trout at all, but a fish more physiologically adapted to its waters.

But Davies fish are indeed “fit” relative to the interwoven landscapes described above – desires emergent from England, as well as from fly-fishing destinations around the world, genes from Kamloops and Shasta, and South African waters. In the end, Davies makes beautiful fish – and a successful fly-fishing fishery for which guests eagerly buy permits. In one sense, Davies indeed makes fish that “fit” one of the many worlds around him. Yet the world that these trout “fit” is not a landscape in the classic ecological sense; instead, it is a complex, translocal apparatus of hatcheries, histories of colonial settlement and land ownership, and gendered desires. While environmental scientists are increasingly considering telecoupling, the implications of transnational landscape links for fundamental biological concepts call out for more substantial and widespread consideration. It is the world-making force of such historically emergent and geographically discontinuous landscapes that our re-working of fitness has sought to foreground.

Conclusion

We began by asking what could be gained by approaching landscapes through bodies. As we have seen, to explain the relationship between an organismal body and a landscape we need to move beyond the classical understanding of bodies being shaped by landscapes. This is because there is a multiplicity of landscapes shaping the fish in the Waterfall, both physical landscapes (British Colombia, California, the Waterfall, Thrift dam, as well as Davies's hatchery) but also human practices stemming from how fish relate to these (British origins, global fly-fishing tourism, European influences, a specific South African approach to fly-fishing). This, we have argued, is an important lesson for studying landscapes in the Anthropocene, as many organisms-in-environments similarly connect landscapes and organisms through colonial and global histories.

But our case also shows the world shaping effects of trout themselves. Not only do landscapes shape bodies, as in the classical understanding of fitness, bodies shape landscapes and practices too. In addition to the ecological effects of trout, waters with trout in them are treated differently from other bodies of water, thereby producing specific landscapes, such as a protected area in our case. And, as we saw, the adaptation of trout to waters has in itself created new fly-fishing techniques and, with them, ideas about what trout fit a specific environment. The fish, their biological, political, and historical environments, and their insertion into colonial imaginaries comprise a multiple- and mutually-constitutive complex of meaning, which can only be understood when we view landscapes through bodies, and bodies through landscapes. This is an important insight for the study of multispecies landscapes.

Highlights

• Trout bodies and landscapes co-evolve, shaping and being shaped by ecological, historical, and colonial entanglements.

• Trout introduction reconfigures landscapes, influencing river management, biodiversity, and exclusionary conservation practices linked to colonial histories.

• Ecological “fitness” is shaped by fly-fishing aesthetics, selective breeding, and transnational imaginaries as well as biological adaptation.

• Landscapes can be studied through bodies, revealing multispecies interactions, colonial legacies, and transformations across geographies.