Anchorage Sport Fish Hatchery

If you’re not into fishing and don’t live in an area where people are, you might not know much about fish hatcheries. I was one of those people. I had no reason to even know they existed until I visited a friend in Ohio, and we went to a hatchery near her house to throw stale bread to the fish. This fit with my outsider perception of the entertainment options available in Ohio (limited)… but I have to admit, it was more fun than I expected. I digress. The point is, there are a lot of fish hatcheries around, whether you’re aware of them or not, and one of the biggest is the William Jack Hernandez Sport Fish Hatchery in Anchorage (they do abbreviate this to WJHSFH, but honestly, that feels just as cumbersome as the full name).

So, what is the purpose of a fish hatchery? Besides the obvious “to hatch fish” and presumably also to grow them. But what’s the point? Well, this varies. A few goals could be to recover endangered species, counteract habitat loss, or support sustainable fishing. There are private fish hatcheries to support commercial fishing interests. The Anchorage facility, as a sport fish hatchery, focuses on creating, improving, and diversifying opportunities for sport fishing in the state and minimizing its impact on wild stocks. The funding for Alaska’s two sport fishing hatcheries comes from the sale of sport fishing licenses and taxes on fishing equipment and boat fuel.

(Note: much of this info I’m going to include comes from info panels in the hatchery. I’ll also include some other sources at the end.)

The Anchorage hatchery is the largest indoor sport fish hatchery in North America (I feel like there’s maybe not a lot of competition for this title, but we’ll let them have it). This site was built in 2011, and all of the fish are raised indoors. This is not the norm. Most hatcheries basically have big, long pools outside for the fish. However, being indoors allows better control of the environment and protection against predators and disease (and it keeps people from feeding uncontrolled substances, like stale bread, to your fish).

WJHSFH (nope, not using that acronym again) raises five species of fish: coho salmon, Chinook salmon, rainbow trout, Arctic grayling, and Arctic char. Each year, over 6 million fish are raised and stocked into over 200 locations. That is incredible. We’ll talk more about the logistics of stocking later, but just think about coordinating the transport of living fish to over 200 LOCATIONS. I’m getting ahead of myself. Who knew that a fish hatchery could be so exciting??

So, how does it all work? (As if anyone is asking… but whether you care or not, here we go!) Let’s go to the beginning. It all starts with eggs and milt (sperm). These are harvested from mature fish using methods that vary based on the species. With the two salmon, fish only reproduce once, even as wild salmon. They spawn in freshwater, live out their days in the saltwater of the ocean, and then return to their freshwater spawning areas for their one opportunity to contribute to the future of their species. Then, they die, and their bodies slowly decompose in the water.

The hatchery goes to a few spawning locations to capture mature salmon and harvest their eggs / milt. Since they would die anyway, the salmon are “dispatched” (as the signage nicely put it) before the females are cut open to access their eggs (one fish can have 10,000 eggs!) and the males are “milked” (the milt is literally squeezed out). Their bodies are then donated to feed bears in wildlife refuges or local sled dogs (they are past the age where they’re edible for humans, but the animals are less picky).

Rainbow trout and Arctic char are a different story. The eggs and milt for these come from “broodstock” which are raised to maturity (about 3-4 years) at the hatchery. Since both of these species survive after spawning, they are generally not “dispatched”. The females are “air spawned” which sounds insane to me. They inflate the fish’s belly with air to force the eggs out. About 2.5 million eggs are collected from the broodstock each year. The males are milked just like the salmon. And then these fish are all stocked into lakes where they can live for many more years.

The eggs and milt are hand-mixed together… I wasn’t sure if that just meant manually or literally with a hand, but I found a video of the process and it was literal hand mixing with no glove. In case you were wondering. Then, they’re put into trays in the incubation room. Fertilized rainbow trout eggs are also sterilized to ensure that stocked trout cannot reproduce with wild trout.

Fun fact: Olivia said that in elementary school, their class was given eggs and milt from the hatchery. They fertilized the eggs and gave them back to the hatchery at the end of their project so that they could be grown and stocked with the other fish. What a fascinating elementary school project… That’s so Alaska.

Depending on species, one incubation tray can contain 7,500-12,000 eggs. The fish go through a few stages in the incubation room, and the time this takes depends on species and temperature. They start out as “green eggs”, or newly fertilized. In a few months, they’ll become “eyed eggs” which literally means that you can see the fish’s developing eyes through the egg shells. After they hatch, they’re called alevin. Alevin still have their yolk sacs with them, and those provide them with nutrients as they continue to develop. Finally, after this sac is fully absorbed, they’re fry, or small fish, and this means it’s time for them to move out of the incubation room to the start-up rearing area.

The start-up rearing room is where the fish start to swim and feed. It has 32 “small” tanks, 2,000 gallons each, and each can hold a maximum of about 110,000 fish. They start out eating food with pieces the size of grains of flour! As they grow, so does their food. Most species spend about 3 months in this room, and during that time they transition through three different feed sizes and grow to 10-30x the size they were when they entered!

Once fish outgrow the shared tanks (at about 3 grams), there are a few different possibilities for their next move. Some are sent to be stocked out as “fingerling” (2-5 inches) which need to grow a little more in the wild before they can be caught. Some rainbow trout and Arctic char become part of the broodstock that will supply the hatchery with eggs and milt. Some are sent to the catchable area where they’ll continue to grow until they reach “catchable” size (7-14 inches). And some salmon are sent to the smolt areas where they will grow until they’re juveniles (smolt) and then are stocked out.

Regardless of where they’re headed, some serious fish-moving has to happen. Guess how they transfer the fish between tanks? HOSES. No joke. And this isn’t a quick little process. The tanks can be FAR apart – some transfers use hundreds of feet of hose! Once the hoses are attached to the tanks, they turn on a pump, coax the fish into the hose, and a fish counter tallies them up as they fall into their new home. For the fish headed to the catchable tanks, they will stay there for 8-12 months, until they’re ready to get stocked out.

The catchable area has 18 tanks, each holding around 30,000 fish and 22,000 gallons of water! The salmon smolt areas have 20 more of these enormous tanks. Each can hold 100,000 coho salmon or 200,000 Chinook salmon! That’s a lot of fish.

It’s also a lot of water! Not surprisingly, they have a VERY intense water treatment situation. I’ll give you the basics (probably still more than you want to know… but oh well). The hatchery uses well water which would kill the fish if it was sent directly to the tanks. I mentioned before that a big advantage of an indoor hatchery is environmental control. Well, this is a perfect example of that. Nitrogen is removed from the water. Oxygen is added. The temperature is adjusted to be ideal for fish development.

Water is always circulating through the tanks. It exits through drains and overflows and is divided into wastewater and recirculation water. The recirculation water needs to be retreated before returning to the tanks, a process that takes about an hour. First, it is cleaned of most solid fish waste via a separator and a filter. Next, it runs through a biofilter which converts fish waste-generated ammonia into nitrite into nitrate which is less toxic for fish. Then, the gases are adjusted. Carbon dioxide and nitrogen are removed. Oxygen and ozone are added. Finally, it runs through a UV filter to sterilize the water and break down the ozone before it’s sent back out to the tanks. The amount of reused water in a tank varies… smaller fish use more fresh water, but by the time they reach the “catchable” tank area, 95% of the water is reused.

Another automated system that helps make life simpler for the hatchery staff is the automated feed system. Pelletized food is delivered to the hatchery in “super sacks” which hold 2,200 lbs (1,000 kg) of food! It’s stored in silos, and feed times and amounts are set in a computer program. When it’s time, the proper amount of food drops out of a silo into the hose below, a blower propels it to a “feed selector” distribution box, and from there, it’s routed into the outgoing hose that leads to the appropriate tank. Finally, at the tank, a spinning spigot sprays the food pellets all around to give the fish an equal shot at getting some.

Now, we’ve finally reached my most favorite part of this whole process – stocking! This is when the fish are taken from the hatchery and sent to live in various bodies of water across Alaska. This is a massive undertaking. There are over 200 different sites stocked from this one hatchery.

Between the two types of salmon, there are 15 release locations. Most salmon are stocked as smolt (juveniles) in rivers and coastal waters, and they swim out to sea to grow before coming back to their stocked location as adults. (Chinook salmon return after 1-6 years, and coho salmon after one.) Other salmon are stocked out at catchable size, some in the fall and then some in the winter for ice fishing. Many of the fish, of course, are caught by sport fisher-people in either the ocean or rivers/streams. Of the ones that evade capture and return to breed, some are collected for broodstock by the hatchery, and the cycle continues.

The other three fish are stocked in landlocked lakes, some at fingerling size (2-5 inches) and others at catchable size (7-14 inches).

Fish are transported from the hatchery in trucks. They have a small fleet of trucks, big and smaller, used for this distribution, and during the heaviest stocking months of May and June, stocking is often a seven-day-per-week activity.

Okay, try to wrap your head around the various elements of this stocking situation… The hatchery has just spent many months hatching and raising and growing literally MILLIONS of fish. Now, it’s time to send them out into the big, wild world. Millions of fish to 200 locations.

There needs to be a schedule. Someone needs to make this schedule. My head is spinning just thinking about it. There are so many factors to consider! What type of fish and how many? What truck is needed? What locations? Where are these locations in relation to each other? How far are they from the hatchery? Who will be driving the truck? Do they need support personnel? Etc. And then apparently things can change last-minute based on lake conditions and access, to the point where they might have to change plans while already on the road. I’m stressed out just from this imaginary scenario. No thank you.

After the schedule situation, it’s not like things get easier. Did you forget that we’re talking about millions of FISH? Living fish! Ideally, fish that continue to be living fish through the entire journey and stocking! From hatchery to truck, along the truck’s journey, and then from truck to water. It’s not like you just pour water into a tank, plop in some fish, and off you go! Remember the hatchery’s high-maintenance water treatment system? The fish don’t get magically less fussy because they’re on the road. The water needs the proper amount of oxygen and none of the bad things that kill fish. And then it has to stay properly oxygenated throughout the drive. Yeesh!

Now, you’ve reached the end of the road to your destination. How on earth do you get the fish into the water? Sometimes, the truck can get close enough to just hook up a big hose and shoot them in (I find this to be an entertaining concept). In some places, there’s not great access, so they might have to CARRY THEM the last little bit from the truck to the water in 5-gallon buckets. (Can you imagine how many buckets-worth of fish can probably fit in one of those trucks??)

In situations where carrying buckets of fish isn’t practical (to me, that’s any situation where more than one bucket of fish is carried more than about five steps… but I imagine their bar is a bit higher), they might drive them in with ATVs. And SOMETIMES, they have to fly them in with little helicopters. Fish delivery by HELICOPTER! It’s insane. Insane!

All of this, remember, is so that people who like fishing can go out and fish without completely decimating the natural populations. As someone who does not quite understand the appeal of fishing, it is baffling to me that so many of these fishing people exist that such an operation is necessary. Apparently, running the facility costs $2-3 million per year, but the revenue generated from the stocking programs is estimated at $20 million per year. So, I may not understand, but clearly a lot of people are into it, and it brings a lot of business to Alaska. I’m happy that they’re happy and that they get to do what they enjoy without a massive environmental cost. So, in conclusion, yay for fish hatcheries! Keep up the good work!