Nick Simonson
By Nick Simonson
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's (FWS) Valley City Fish Hatchery has been host to a number of notable fish species which are raised from eggs and fry up to stockable fingerling sizes each spring and summer. From more common sportfish such as walleyes and pike, to a notable tiger muskie program in the 1990s, a wide variety of species have come through the hatchery from season-to-season. This year, the facility will play host to perennial angles favorites as well as some new ones which will be raised from eggs on up to fish measuring a few inches long including walleyes, lake sturgeon, and new this season, channel catfish, according to Chris Hooley, FWS Hatchery Manager.
"Last week we got in 220 brood channel catfish that went out into the ponds from Lake Oahe. Walleye eggs will be showing up next week and they'll be rolling around the jars for probably five to seven days and they'll be hatching out and headed to the ponds. Then probably next week some time we'll be headed to the Rainy River in Minnesota to do some lake sturgeon spawning and bringing the eggs back here to hatch them out and grow them up," Hooley details.
Catfish rearing at the hatchery is a new endeavor for the staff working the ponds, by which those fish taken from Lake Oahe are provided items of underwater structure such as metal boxes and milk cans around which to spawn. By late June or early July, staff will be able to harvest the eggs from the pond and place them in the hatching jars within the buildings similar to the way walleye eggs are hatched earlier in the season. Once old enough, the catfish fry will be placed back in the ponds and allowed to mature until October, when they'll be stocked in select waters around the area with significant bullhead populations.
"The channel catfish, the way I understand it, are going to go into two different bodies of water, and those two bodies of water have a pretty bad bullhead population in them. The hope is those channel catfish will grow up and prey on the bullheads and get rid of some of the bullheads that are in the water. That's kind of the goal behind the channel catfish stuff, is that we will release these fish out into these different lakes, and they will help control some of the bullhead problems that we're seeing," Hooley details.
The lake sturgeon raised at the hatchery will head to the Pembina River in northeastern North Dakota and to tributaries of the Red River in western Minnesota. 1,000 sturgeon will be stocked in the Pembina River, with lowhead dam modification on the horizon at the junction between the tributary and the Red River into which it flows. This will open up many contiguous miles of the Pembina to the highly-migratory sturgeon and the stocking effort will mirror those going on in western Minnesota to restore the prehistoric fish to the border flow which has also benefitted from lowhead dam removal. The approximately 7,000 remaining reared sturgeon fingerlings will go to Minnesota, where they will supplement a burgeoning population which has begun naturally reproducing on the smaller tributaries which feed the Red River.
Walleyes will be stocked into various lakes around the region, but as the water utilized by the hatchery comes from the Sheyenne River, which is a Class I infested flow with zebra mussel populations well established, Hooley details that fish raised at the hatchery will only go into waters where the aquatic nuisance species is already present. In the meantime, hatchery staff are sizing up filtration and infrastructure changes to help prevent zebra mussels and their larval veligers (which can be as small as 39 microns or about one-one-thousandth of a inch in width) from getting into the ponds in the future, and expand their stocking operations back to what they were prior to the infestation on the Sheyenne.
"Right now, there's a plan in place to get some rotary drum filters here at the facility. When that is going to happen is still yet to be determined. But I think that's the option that we're going to go with and what that will do is will filter out al the zebra adults and the veligers. I think the filter size on those screens is 31 microns, so it's extremely small and it will get rid of a lot of stuff that's unwanted," Hooley explains.
In addition to being a key resource for fish stocking, the Valley City Fish Hatchery facility has many outdoor recreation features open to the public, including a canoe and kayak launch, picnic and grilling areas, access to shoreline fishing on the Sheyenne River, and a stocked pond featuring pike, perch and stocked trout for young anglers to pursue. More information on the facility, hours and use can be found at fws.gov/fish-hatchery/valley-city.
Simonson is the lead writer and editor of Dakota Edge Outdoors.
Featured Photo: Get Growing. Lake sturgeon fry, called swim-ups, are raised in aerated drums at the Valley City US FWS Hatchery. 1,000 of the fingerling fish will be stocked in the fall in the Pembina River of northeast North Dakota and 7,000 will go to tributaries of the Red River in western Minnesota. This season, the facility will hatch and raise walleyes and channel catfish along with the lake sturgeon. Simonson Photo.
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