The Dolly Varden trout (Salvelinus malma) is a species of salmonid ray-finned fish native to cold-water tributaries of the Pacific Ocean in Asia and North America.

[2] The species was originally named by German naturalist and taxonomist Johann Julius Walbaum in 1792 based on type specimens from the Kamchatka Peninsula in Siberia.

Additionally, the Arctic char (S. alpinus) along with the bull trout have ranges that overlap and are remarkably similar in appearance, thus complicating identification.

[4] It appears that the first recorded use of the Dolly Varden name for fish referred to S. confluentus, now commonly known as the bull trout.

The landlocked Miyabe Char (S. m. miyabei Oshima, 1938) from Lake Shikaribetsu on Hokkaido in Japan is also included in the Dolly Varden species.

[3][7] The first recorded use of the name "Dolly Varden" was applied to members of S. confluentus caught in the McCloud River in northern California in the early 1870s.

My grandmother, then a young girl of 15 or 16, had been reading Charles Dickens' Barnaby Rudge in which there appears a character named Dolly Varden; also the vogue in fashion for women at that time (middle 1870s) was called "Dolly Varden", a dress of sheer figured muslin worn over a bright-colored petticoat.

Fluvial forms live in moderate to large freshwater riverine environments and migrate into smaller tributaries to spawn.

[13] Between 1921 and 1941, the Territory of Alaska, supported by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, had an official extermination program that paid bounties on Dolly Varden.

[9] In the Iliamna Lake/Kvichak River region in southwest Alaska, the bounty was 2.5 cents per Dolly Varden tail turned into the territorial tax collector.

Locals would trap Dolly Varden in nets and weirs, string 40 tails on a hoop of bailing wire and smoke them over a wood fire.

[14] The northern Dolly Varden in the Canadian province of British Columbia and in the federal region of the Northwest Territories is listed as a species of special concern.

Dolly Varden make up a sizable percentage of the catch in Alaskan subsistence fisheries where salmon are not abundant.