Could you fly fish for the extinct New Zealand grayling

In this episode I talk to Dr Nic Rawlence director of the University of Otago's Palaeogenetics Laboratory and PhD student Lachlan Scarsbrook, based at Oxford University in the UK, about the extinct New Zealand grayling.

I also talk to Ross Bailey, an Australian fly fisherman who has in the past caught Australian grayling as bycatch. The Australian grayling is protected and you are not allowed to target them. Ross shares how he caught them on the fly, what fly patterns they went for, what rivers they are found in, how hard they fought. He also talk about catching their far-off cousins in Europe and Alaska.

The grayling was hyper-abundant and was New Zealand's most common fish. It is, for now, the only extinct New Zealand fish.

Dr Nic and Lachlan do a deep dive into a DNA study they did, what they found, the wide ranging theories of how the fish became extinct, what it ate (which is a clue to how you'd fish for it if you are a fly-fisherman), we establish that you don’t have to fish every weekend to be able to study fish, we talk about possible reintroduction of the fish, and Lachlan says Nic is a rainmaker when it comes to getting funding for studies. We also talk about dogs, wolves and why using fish as fertiliser isn't a good idea.