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When August rolls around, the Genoa National Fish Hatchery is roughly 70% through the yearly growing season for age 0+ lake sturgeon fingerlings. The fish have grown from egg to roughly three to six inches long, depending on which river strain of four to six rivers that they are from and the spawning month of their birth river.
Lake sturgeon that the station collects may spawn from mid-April to mid-June, which makes for quite a large travelling area to collect from in spring. Now the fish are being fed frozen bloodworms and frozen ocean krill. They can grow as much as two inches a month at this stage, and this helps them avoid predation in the wild as they begin to outgrow some of their earlier predators. Around this time, due to lake sturgeon being such prolific egg producers, we begin to outgrow our tank space in the two buildings that we use to raise the young fingerlings. The amount of fry surplus to our fish restoration plan requests are used either in other conservation agencies restoration programs, or research to ensure sea lamprey control treatments are at a level to be effective and still safe for lake sturgeon fry that are still residing in their birth or natal streams. Surplus fish this year totaled 68,000 lake sturgeon distributed to two state conservation agencies, one federal conservation agency, a federal research center and a zoo working cooperatively with the USFWS on sturgeon conservation.
Now that room has been freed up to grow the remainder of this year’s production, the remaining 31,500 fish will be grown to seven inches in length to increase post stocking survival and released into waters from Minnesota, Missouri, Tennessee, and New York state. Research has shown that once the fish have reached the larger size of seven inches, post stocking survival increases several fold from a smaller release size. The fish should reach this size from mid-September to mid-October this year, when the next distribution sequence will begin in earnest. Then coldwater species egg collections and receipts arrive and an entirely new chapter of life will begin.
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