Plants and animals of Lake Tahoe and its watershed, from the lake floor to the summit of Freel Peak. Each entry says where it lives, whether it belongs here, and what to know about it.
Boundaries are approximate and shift with slope and aspect.
Generated with Google Gemini in the manner of a nineteenth-century natural history atlas. These are not Audubon plates and were not painted from specimens, so treat them as illustrations, not identification references. Plate numbers, names and status come from the captions under each image. Ignore any text printed inside a painting; it is generated and can be wrong.
Species still waiting for a painted plate, drawn in code. They keep their place in the plate numbering. Read them as quick sketches for recognition, not identification-grade art.
Lake trout arrived in the late 1880s, kokanee in 1944, and Mysis shrimp in 1963 to 1965. Mysis ate the native Daphnia nearly to nothing by about 1970, which removed the lake's main algae grazer. UC Davis measured average clarity of 102.4 ft in 1968 and 62.3 ft in 2024.
Lahontan cutthroat trout were gone from the lake by the late 1930s. State and federal hatcheries now stock about 100,000 a year, and in 2024 biologists watched fish attempt to spawn on their own in Third Creek at Incline Village, the first such attempt in nearly 90 years.
Quagga, zebra and golden mussels are not in Tahoe. Golden mussels reached the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in 2024, and inspectors intercepted 10 boats carrying them out of about 5,200 inspections in the 2026 season. New Zealand mudsnails did get in and were found off the south shore in September 2023.
Most of the basin was logged between the 1860s and 1890s to timber the Comstock mines. The forest that grew back is dense and heavy with white fir. Drought, bark beetles and fire now drive it: the Angora Fire in 2007 and the Caldor Fire in 2021 both burned inside the basin.
Tahoe yellow cress grows only on Tahoe's sandy beaches, so high lake levels drown its habitat and low levels expose more. The 2025 survey counted about 5,575 plants on 19 beaches.