Spokane Hatchery Making Sure We’ll Have Plenty Of Trout To Catch

On the far North Side, something very fishy is going on.

It’s the time of year when the Spokane Fish Hatchery, W2927 Waikiki Road, is busy retrieving and fertilizing more than 8 million eggs used to help keep Washington’s lakes and streams stocked with trout.

“We have 3,000 females to spawn in a three-month period,” says Mike Albert, the hatchery’s manager. Each of those trout gives anywhere from 2,400 to 3,400 eggs, depending on the age of the fish.

The hatchery is working on what is essentially the tail end of their fertilization season. From late November until mid-January, workers extract, fertilize and begin incubating rainbow trout eggs. Those eggs, when mature, will make up 40 percent of the rainbow trout the state uses to stock areas that otherwise would be troutless.

Fortunately for them, rainbow trout don’t die after spawning like salmon. So the hatchery uses the same breeder fish until they are 3 or 4 years old. After that, they are used for stocking and are shipped out to join their offspring.

In the wild, rainbow trout usually spawn in the spring, Albert says. The fish at the hatchery are a little different.

“Through genetic manipulation and selective breeding, they’re made to spawn from November until January,” he says.

Once the female trout are ready to spawn, workers actually wade into a large tank, sedate the fish and remove the eggs with a suction device. The eggs then are fertilized with sperm from the hatchery’s 800 male trout.

There are more than three times as many females as there are males. Ideally, Albert says, a male would only be allowed to fertilize one female’s eggs, so the genetic diversity of the population would be maintained.

The current demand for stock fish from the Spokane hatchery, though, makes that tough. The hatchery would have to expand to keep 3,000 males or decrease current production.

Once the eggs are fertilized, they are taken inside for incubation. After 16 days, workers remove the dead eggs, to protect the rest of the population from fungus.

After 32 days, the eggs hatch. Once the fish finish feeding on their egg sacks, they rise to the surface in search of food. Hatchery workers then have to feed them once an hour.

Albert says he uses a computer to calculate how much to feed the fish. He determines how big he wants the trout to be by a certain time, and the computer tells him how much to increase or decrease daily food intake.

“It’s calculated by percentage of the fishes’ body weight,” Albert says. “They go through 125,000 pounds of feed per year.”

Some take up to 18 months to fully mature. In the meantime, there are a lot of barriers a fishy youngster must breach.

Disease and predators typically claim about 10 percent of the fish before they are released. Last summer, though, was especially rough, as 20 percent were lost, mostly to birds.

“The blue heron population just exploded,” Albert says.

Since then, protective netting has been placed over the outside maturation tanks, and Albert says that seems to be working.

A total of 1.5 million trout will stay in this area of the state. The rest will be shipped throughout Washington to other places typically void of spawning habitat.

“If it wasn’t for these, there wouldn’t be any fish (in those areas) as far as trout is concerned,” Albert says.