<img src="http://www.joplinglobeonline.com/images/zope/extra.gif" border=0> Raising fish for Opening Day a blend of science, farming <font color="#ff0000">w/ hatchery info & fishing report </font>

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February 27, 2010

Hatchery celebrates 100 years

Anonymous The Joplin Globe Sat Feb 27, 2010, 11:02 PM CST

By Andy Ostmeyer

aostmeyer@joplinglobe.com

CASSVILLE, Mo. — The fish — thousands of them — melded into a single swirling mass of muscle.

While Jerry Dean watched, workers slid large nets into the raceway and brought up dozens of rainbow trout with each pass. These fish were being moved to a new, albeit temporary home, one of the 33 holes that make up the pool-and-falls, pool-and-falls rhythm of Roaring River.

There, the fish will have a few days to adapt, but come Monday, thousands of anglers will line up elbow to elbow along both banks, waiting for a gunshot to signal the start of trout season in Missouri.

Within seconds, the first of those fish stocked last week, lured by a menagerie of rooster tails, salmon eggs and neon-colored worms, will be hauled from the water. Within the hour, a few will already be in the pan.

Opening Day is a Missouri tradition, with anglers pouring in from all over the country to sling away at one of the trout parks in the state.

There’s a rush when that line tightens and the hook sets, but that rush is merely the end result of an effort that has in some ways been a century in the making.

Asked how many of the 7,500 trout being stocked this week may survive Opening Day, Dean, the hatchery manager, said he isn’t sure. As many as 2,500 anglers are expected Monday at Roaring River State Park.

“With the fishing pressure as heavy as it is, most get caught fairly soon,” Dean said.

McCloud River

Although they are now big business in the state, trout are not native to Missouri.

They were first stocked in the state in the late 1800s. At one point, the U.S. Fish Commission operated rail cars that transported trout and eggs to streams along major U.S. rail routes, including the Frisco’s route through Southwest Missouri. Over the years, everything from Pacific and Atlantic salmon to lake and brook trout were stocked in Missouri.

But one species hung on, doing better than the rest. They were the rainbows that came from the McCloud River in California, where the U.S. Fish Commission at one time had a station.

“They got shipped all over the world,” Dean said of McCloud River trout. “They got shipped to Michigan, the East Coast. They even got shipped to Tasmania.”

When federal hatcheries like the one in Neosho were built, McCloud River rainbows were a good fit for a number of reasons: They did well in hatcheries, they’re disease resistant and relatively easy to catch.

So in 1910, Roland Bruner, who had already built a hotel, restaurant and cabins along Roaring River, added a hatchery where 20 million gallons of water a day roll out at the base of a weathered dolomite bluff. Bruner saw trout as a surefire way to hook more tourists, and he loaded a water tank on a truck to meet the railroad when it came through.

All went well for a while, until fire destroyed some of the buildings, a flood wrecked the hatchery, and the resort and the land were sold at auction on the steps of a courthouse in St. Louis. The next owner, Thomas Sayman, donated the hatchery, resort and surrounding land to the state. It became Roaring River State Park.

Nobody knows how many fish were produced when the hatchery was in private hands, or even during the first decade after state ownership. But the existing records of fish production at Roaring River, which go back nearly 70 years, indicate 11 million fish have been raised in the hatchery in the last 70 years.

‘Eyed-eggs’

The fish Dean and his crew stocked Wednesday are descendants of those McCloud River rainbows. There are actually two strains of rainbows stocked at Roaring River. The Missouri strain spawns in the fall and those eggs are produced at Shepherd of the Hills Hatchery near Branson. The second strain, the Missouri Arlee strain, spawns in the later winter and early spring. They trace their lineage to the McCloud River and to rainbows taken from near Mount Ranier. Their broodstock is kept at Roaring River.

“Nine hundred eggs per pound of body weight,” Dean said, as he pointed to the large females in one of the hatchery’s pools.

During the winter, when fishing slacks off at Roaring River, the Missouri Department of Conservation crew gathers the females and puts them into a tub mixed with anesthetic.

So as not to damage the females — and to improve the chances of survival — oxygen is injected into the fish, forcing the discharge of the eggs. After the eggs are fertilized with milt from male trout, the eggs are put into an incubator.

The inside of the hatchery is part working lab and part water plant.

Water coming out of the spring is “supersaturated” with nitrogen, Dean explained, and so they add oxygen to the water to displace the nitrogen, which improves the survival rate of the young fish.

“Otherwise the fish get pop eyes and air bubbles in the circulatory system,” he said.

Water coming off of the spring also is treated with ultraviolet light to kill pathogens that could hurt the fish.

“It is biology. It is an animal,” said Kevin Asbury, assistant hatchery manager. “Everything can turn upside down.”

Dean peeled back black plastic from the incubator to reveal thousands of yellow and white trout eggs, each smaller than a pea.

“We call those ‘eyed eggs,’” he said of the yellow eggs, noting that at about this stage the eyes and other organs of the fish can be seen developing in the translucent eggs. “Once you see the eyes develop, you know they are not sensitive anymore and you can handle them.”

After the eggs hatch, the young trout, known as fry, feed off of a yolk sac for nine days.

“After nine days they start swimming up from the bottom (of the tank), and that is when we start to feed them,” he explained.

The fry are kept in raceways indoors, protected from direct sunlight, until they are about 3 inches long, when they are transferred to outdoor raceways. There, over the next year, they will grow to the 12-inch fish that will be stocked in Roaring River. The fry and fingerlings in the hatchery this year will probably be ready for stocking for Opening Day in 2011, Dean said.

‘Great thing’

If all that sounds simple, it’s not.

Floods wash gravel down the hillside and clog the pools in the river. Drought forces the hatchery to cut back on production even though the anglers keep coming. A clogged filter could jeopardize thousands of dollars worth of work. Historic stone work done by the Civilian Conservation Corps at the hatchery always needs work. And like other state agencies of late, the Missouri Department of Conservation has had to deal with belt tightening.

None of that matters much on Opening Day, though. Dean and crew have to have that river ready.

If statistics hold in 2010, about 100,000 people will fish some piece of the 1.6 miles of Roaring River before the catch-and-keep season winds down in October, but only a handful of those visitors will have any idea of the work that goes on behind the scenes to make it possible.

Dean just smiles when asked about that.

“It’s a great thing for Missouri,” Dean said of the hatchery. “Trout parks are a great place to bring a family. Generations of families have grown up and fished here. There have been so many memories.”