The Written Word
for January 23, 2000

Last Wednesday I spoke about sports-fishing and my love of it. Today I’d like to discuss a topic about which there is a great deal of misunderstanding – fish hatcheries.

This is not, of course, a new technology. One of the great examples of hatchery fish working was back in the 1880s when Brown Trout were transplanted first to Australia then New Zealand. The ova were carefully packed and kept moist on what was then still a long voyage by sail and hatched half a world away. Similar plantings took place in the United States.

A few years later Rainbow Trout were taken, in the form of ova, from Sonoma Creek in Northern California to the streams of Lake Taupo in the center of the North Island of New Zealand where they – and Browns – now form one of the world’s great sport-fishing Meccas. The story of the Rainbow in Taupo is that of amateurs, not knowing what the hell they were doing, lucking out. When the fish first took hold in the Taupo Streams, the Tongariro being the most famous but by no means the only one let alone the best, they thrived as the Steelhead they were. They used the rivers for spawning and spent the rest of their life in the large lake as the Steelhead uses the ocean. For several years they thrived on the small crayfish, the Kouri, but in due course they started to get thinner and die out. They simply were too much for the Kouri so the settlers, not having the faintest idea what they were doing, transplanted some smelt from nearby Rotorua (since “roto” means lake in Maori it’s redundant to say Lake Rotorua, though most do). Happily the smelt took hold, the fish survived and the Kouri returned to their traditional numbers.

All this by way of saying that intervention by man has its place.The great trout lakes of British Columbia, especially in the Kamloops region, are nearly all otherwise barren lakes stocked from the Pennask Lake hatchery.

Where the hatchery has justifiably got its bad name is in the raising of trout, often sexless called triploids, for “put and take” operations especially in crowded areas of the United States and Britain. These fish are raised to maturity in “stew ponds” and fed pellets, then released to be soon caught by eager fishermen. Often these fish are not only inferior in every imaginable way, but have hardly any tails. They fill a need but unfortunately they have raised a prejudice which is not entirely warranted.

I say not entirely because it’s still preferable to have wild fish.

I must say that my thinking on this subject has altered over the past few years. Having fished a number of reservoirs in Britain and caught the half tailed excuses for fish that are often there, I was very down on the hatchery method.

A man named Arthur Oglesby, an English sports fisherman of great repute and a noted angling author, altered my thinking. He recently pointed out in an article in Trout & Salmon, the first rate British sports-fishing magazine, that many of Britain’s greatest salmon rivers owe their present stock of fish to stockings past, stockings that took place 100 years ago in some cases. The stocking, done by carefully stripping and fertilizing wild stock replenished and kept alive many rivers. The trick is in using wild stock where possible but also, and even more importantly, releasing the fish as smolts not as adults. It may be and often is that the first few generations of fish will not be as good as wild fish but the important fact is that if at the same time you remove the causes of the wild stocks failing, namely restore the habitat, these stocked fish will themselves become wild.

As Oglesby points out, the alternative to stocked fish replenishing the river is no fish at all.

No, we don’t want the “put and take” situation where the hatchery dumps adult fish in the river and 25 yards downstream anglers start pulling them out. But a wise use of hatcheries done properly can restore and maintain a resource that otherwise would be extinct.

It’s an old story – a prejudice with some foundation in truth can become so entrenched that it’s no longer possible to point out that the exceptions may be of critical importance.