There is an entire world out there that I did not know existed! If any of you ever gets a chance to go to the Willamette Hatchery, GOOOOOO!!! It is a wonderful (might I say, magical?) sort of place.
First there is the technical... a few details:
They go to a damn and bring the female and male salmon up to the spawning ponds... they bring about one third more females than males which end with them having about the same amount of each.
When it is time (this part is sad) they kill the fish and take the eggs and sperm. They mix these... each female will give around 4000 eggs... they then raise these eggs until hatching..
Coolest thing #1 - they have a machine that takes each of the eggs, shines a light through it and determines if it is viable or not.... a puff of air discardes it, if not...
Cool Detail: Each fish, when it hatches, is still attached to its egg sack... it carries the egg sack under its belly (which is still open to the inside of the egg sack) and lives off the yolk from that.. for almost a month! When the egg sack has been reabsorbed, if everything works right, the slit then closes and you have a 'weaned' fish.
So... they then raise these fish and release them to live out the normal life cycle...
Coolest thing #2) There were several ponds of fish, all the same age, that range in size from a few inches to a foot or so... they effect the size of the fish in a calculated way by adjusting the amount of feed! There are computer programmes that tell them how much to feed the fish and on what schedual so they reach a desired size at a desired time! Woh!
Ok... most disturbing thing I learned... they actually put a dye in the fish food that makes the meat of the hatchery fish pink because the fishermen like it better... that is just wrong...
So... basically, I had a BLAST!!!!!!!! (do not tell my boss, please... :)
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