September, 2024
Rivers abound here in the Pacific Northwest of the USA. In particular, lots of rivers flow down from the Olympic Mountains and then west to the Pacific Ocean … or they flow down from the Olympics to the north to the Strait of Juan de Fuca … or they flow down to the east to Hood Canal. All of those rivers are fresh water, flowing from lovely snow-covered, ice-covered, magnificent mountains. Those rivers all flow into the salt waters below them … to the west, north, and east. And that’s just on the Olympic Peninsula … that’s not over on the Cascade Mountains side of Puget Sound, from Mt. Baker or Mt. Rainier or Glacier Peak or Mt. Shuksan or Snowking Mountain or Mt. Pilchuck or any of a great number of other mountains and of other mountain ranges here that do the same thing where their waters flow into Puget Sound or the Pacific Ocean. And then there’s Canada with even MORE rivers and fresh water flowing into the ocean water.
So, here in Washington State there are a lot of saltwater and freshwater fish, and a lot of fish that inhabit both environments, like salmon! And so, not surprisingly, there are a good number of salmon fish hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest. This week I’m camped at Dosewallips State Park on the Olympic Peninsula, practically right next to a fish hatchery.
So today, I visited the Quilcene National Fish Hatchery just north of Dosewallips State Park. Fish on!
What a beautiful day!!
There are fish hatcheries in Washington that are much larger than this one, and some that are smaller. This hatchery is one of the oldest in the USA. Notice the big white pickup truck (mine) parked in the parking lot … the only vehicle there.
I wandered around a little bit, but quickly decided I should head into the visitor’s center, the main building, and learn what there was to learn there, and check in with the people who manage the operations.
I was amazed at the amount of information inside! There was more information and photos here than in any other hatchery I’ve visited. I’ll share just a portion of it here with you folks. First off, there was a document posted on the wall that listed the answers to the most commonly asked questions …
As that sign above says, this hatchery raises only Coho Salmon these days. [“salmon” is pronounced “sam-un” emphasis on “sam”.] Hmm, so just Coho Salmon here, but what about all the other types of salmon? There’s dog salmon, pink salmon, humpy salmon, chinook salmon, coho salmon, king salmon, silver salmon, sockeye salmon, red salmon, chum salmon. Ah, but … of those ten names, only five are real types of salmon, the other five are nicknames. So which is which? Do you know? 🙂
And then, inside that building, there was a computer screen with images scrolling past that spoke to the history of this hatchery as well as current practices … the people, the fish, etc. I watched the whole thing, twice! Then I took a photo of each image of that video while it scrolled past me a third time. Yes, I stood there and took a photo of each image. Rather than post individual photos here, I’ve created a slideshow group of photos below. Starting with just the first image below, click on the right arrow to scroll through them .. or on the left arrow to go back. The photos will open in turn, no need to leave this blog or figure out how to get back. If you don’t want this much detail, then skip on down to the other photos below.
Those photos were an excellent introduction to the hatchery, how it works, the fish, the weather, the people who work here, what the spawning process is all about.
In addition to those computer images shown inside that building, there were also many print images, and photos, and lists of info on the walls inside this building. I took photos of most of them. I’ll share just a couple of them with you.
First photo is of a life-size physical model of a Coho Salmon in the “ocean stage” … what the fish would look like if caught while it was living out in the Pacific Ocean.
This next photo (below) is of another life-size physical model of a Coho Salmon, but it’s in the “spawning stage”. This is what they look like when they return to spawn (and then die) up in fresh river waters, up in rivers like the Dosey (Dosewallips).
There were three posters on the wall here showing all five different types of salmon in different stages. Here’s one of the prints showing Steelhead and Chum. Steelhead are one of the largest of salmons.
The Northern Green Frog is among the most significant predators of salmon. I didn’t know that. Some research is required!
And then it was time to leave the inside of that building and get a good look at the hatchery itself. Of course, I started where the adult fish come into the hatchery in the autumn, just as they are getting ready to spawn.
In the photo below, the RED arrow points to the top of the fish ladder. The adult fish swim in from the ocean, then swim up the Quilcene River, then at a dam across the river that is purpose-built the fish “climb” a fish ladder (jumping from pool to pool trying to get upriver), then they enter the top “pond” at that RED arrow.
The contraption below pumps the fish up out of the “pond” and then into holding tanks.
The contraption is called a “pescalator”. Pesca is Spanish for “fish” … so I suspect this is an escalator for fish and someone just coined that fun word.
The photo below shows the pescalator on the right, and the shaded holding pens for the adult fish after they’ve gone through the pescalator. The pescalator takes the fish from the water below the pescalator, from the “pond”, and it moves the fish into those holding pens. If you look closely, you can see that anyone can walk right up to the fence and look into that narrow “pond” that the adult fish have just climbed into via the fish ladder (the fish ladder is on the left, outside the photo).
So that’s where I went, right up to the fence … and peered in through the chain link fence.
Whoa, salmon! LOTS of them!
The fish moved so fast that it was almost impossible to get a still photo of them. Here’s a short video (below) that I took of one tiny portion of that “pond”. The fish came into the pond from the left. That small bit of wire grate in the water on the left provided a small bit of protection from the water pouring in (to aerate the water), so that’s where many of the fish were trying (still!) to get upriver. In the video below, the first fish pops up at about 20 seconds into the video. Then there are more, but they are fast! Keep you eyes open during the last few seconds of the video!
While I was watching the fish in that “pond”, a hatchery employee came out and walked out on one of the center walkways inside a holding pen (below). There were no railings there, she better have good balance! At first I wondered why she would be wearing a skirt … but I soon realized she had shorts on in this heat … and she had a bag of fish food in front of her (hence it looked like a skirt). She was feeding these adult fish, tossing fish food left and right.
So then, after the adult salmon are put into these pens, and are fed and kept healthy, they are then “processed”. You will have seen much of that process in the slideshow above. The eggs and sperm are removed, mixed, the resulting eggs are kept safe until they grow into tiny little salmon “fry” … small fry yes? 🙂 Eventually, those young’uns grow large enough (and are then called “smolts”) to be released back into the river to head back out to sea. Each fish takes about three years to do all of this, be born, grow up, head out to the sea, and then come back to spawn, and then they die.
After seeing the pens where the adult fish were kept for a little while, I walked over to the larger section of the hatchery where there were many more pens or “raceways” … all full of salmon smolts, all about one year old. And these pens, I could walk right up to!
Notice the splashing white water at the bottom of the photo above. It’s not created by fish trying to get out … it’s created by water being pumped into each pen to aerate the water in the pen, and to keep the water fresh and clean, and so keep the young salmon healthy.
Here’s a video of hundreds of young salmon in just one small portion of just that one raceway.
There’s an ongoing discussion about whether hatcheries are good. Decades ago, when the fish population/numbers started to decline, hatcheries were created to build those numbers back, and to save the salmon. Today there’s talk about the original native populations of salmon that are being reduced because of the hatcheries, because the fish are not allowed to repopulate on their own, and because some hatcheries use “introduced” salmon instead of the local salmon. I know of one hatchery here in Washington that was shut down completely and the dam removed because of that argument. The original native salmon population in that river exploded in numbers! They returned upriver and are healthier than ever. And we no longer have to support the expense of that hatchery.
But … that requires a healthy, clean river. That requires that the spawning locations of those fish remain clean and are left alone, that the water depth and temperature remain healthy for them. That requires that we humans don’t pollute the rivers, the land next to the rivers, the air. It’s a choice.
I’m sure there are a good number of you readers here who know much more than I do about these hatcheries, and about salmon. Please share your comments! 🙂 I had a great time here today.