Although the data hasn’t been officially tallied yet, this summer’s netting efforts on Yellowstone Lake resulted in the capture and killing of more than 300,000 lake trout for the second year in a row.

“The significant thing is we focused heavily through the whole season on large fish,” said Todd Koel, Yellowstone’s supervisory fisheries biologist.

Removing large adults can significantly depress the population since big females can lay thousands of eggs when they spawn in the fall.

Including this year’s catch, the Park Service has removed about 1.4 million lake trout from Yellowstone Lake since 1994.

The agency is trying to reduce the nonnative fish to help restore native Yellowstone cutthroat trout.

The lake used to be the cutthroat’s stronghold, but since lake trout numbers have swelled, cutthroat numbers have nose-dived as the predatory lake trout have dined on the smaller cutthroat trout.

Based on lakewide monitoring this summer, though, Koel is optimistic that cutthroat numbers are rebounding, however slowly.

“For a second year in a row we saw large pulses of young cutthroat trout coming back,” he said.

The key will be seeing cutthroat trout return to Yellowstone Lake’s spawning streams in the spring.

The park’s fisheries crew was also busy this summer poisoning Grayling Creek in the northwest corner of the park to remove nonnative fish and restore Yellowstone cutthroat trout and stream-dwelling arctic grayling.