Kitimat River Hatchery - Background Information

The Kitimat River Fish Hatchery was first started in 1977 as a pilot project. It was located across from the Eurocan Pulp and Paper mill. At that time it consisted of an Atco trailer containing a few troughs. The hatchery only released 50,000 – 150,000 fish. The Hatchery was started because of decreased salmon stocks from historical levels, particularly in the Chinook. Overfishing, habitat degradation, industrial logging, etc. caused the decreased stocks.

The Government of Canada granted the Kitimat Hatchery with 10 million dollars to build the facility as it is today. Construction was completed in 1983, and now 11 million fish are released each year.

Hatchery Description:

The Kitimat Hatchery consists of 14 outside raceways, 62 Capilano Troughs, 6 Chum Keeper Channels, 80 Atkin Cells, and 672 Heath trays. There are three ways that we get our water. 5 wells are located around the property, there is a river water intake pump, and we use industrial wastewater at 40oC that is supplied by Eurocan. This water is used to heat the building as well as manipulate the growth of the fry.

Hatchery Operations:

At the hatchery five different species of salmonids are raised, the Chum, Chinook, Coho, Cutthroat, and Steelhead. The Steelhead and Cutthroat are actually trout, but they are sea-run trout, which means that they have the same life cycle as a salmon by going out to the ocean to mature and returning to the rivers to spawn.

There are various different ways in which the adult fish are obtained, Angling / Tangle Netting / Seine Netting are methods used by hatchery staff and volunteers. After the fish are caught they will be transported back to hatchery site and held in concrete raceways until they are ripe. The fish are ready to spawn, they will be crowded up and placed into a bin of anaesthetic for easier handling. We run our fingers along the bellies to feel for loose eggs. If they are ready they will be hit on the head and taken inside to be placed on the bleeding rack. They are hung upside down and their gills will be cut to drain any blood or fluids left in the body, so none of it will mix with the eggs. After they have hung they will have their bellies slit from their vent to their throat and the eggs will pour out into a clean dry bucket. The same is done with the males except that their bellies just have to be squeezed in order to retrieve the sperm. The eggs will then be taken to the incubation room to be fertilised.

The beginning of the life cycle is the egg stage. The eggs and sperm are mixed together and placed in water to start the fertilisation. The eggs are placed into heath trays, except for the chum, which go into atkin cells. At this stage in their life they are extremely fragile, any excess light or noise can increase the mortality rate among the eggs for this reason we keep our incubation room, very dark, quiet, and damp. The egg stage lasts from three to five weeks.

The next stage is the eyed egg. You can actually see the eyes and spine of the fish developing within the egg. The egg is very strong in this stage and you can actually bounce the egg off the floor and it will still survive. At this point we will shock the eggs by dropping them into a bucket. If the eggs are unfertilised, sick, or dead they will turn white. Hatchery staff will go through all of the eggs and pick out the dead ones by hand. The eyed egg stage lasts for a period of three to four weeks.

After the eggs have been picked through they will be placed back into the heath trays, the chums are moved into the keeper channels. There are a total of six keepers that hold up to 1 million fish. They are set up to be just like riverbeds. There are screens placed on top of a layer of rocks. The eggs are spread out on the screens and when the eyed eggs hatch into the next stage, which is the alevin, they will swim through the screens and hide among the rocks. The reason that the Chum are placed in the keepers and not back in the incubation room is that they have a much thinner yolk sac and it can rub off easily when they are confined to a tight space. Without the yolk sac the alevin cannot survive. The Chum will stay in the keepers for one and a half months before they begin to swim downstream where there is a gate that we open for them to swim to our outside raceways where they begin to feed. All of the other species are kept in the heath trays, which hold seven to ten thousand eggs, until they grow around their yolk sack which is called buttoning up.

After the fish have buttoned up they will be taken out of the heath trays and put into Capilano troughs. This is when the feeding process begins. The fish had been previously eating off of their yolk sac as alevin. They will be fed twenty times a day, as the fry increases in size, the food size decreases as does the number of times a day they are fed. At this stage it becomes easy to identify each species by the different marks that start to appear on their bodies. This is also around the same time as we do our marking process.

Before releasing our fish we will go through a percentage of them and mark them. We will mark 1 out of every 40 Chum, all of our Steelhead and Cutthroat, and ten percent of out Chinook and Coho. The Chinook and Coho also get a coded wire tag inserted into their snout. This wire tag will tell us how old the fish is, where it is from, where it was released, and what species it is. The external mark we use on our fish is an adipose clip.

This clip tells the fisherman that the fish is from the hatchery and the head needs to be returned to there. As an incentive to return the head the fisherman will receive information about he fish he caught and is entered into a draw for a fishing trip for two, or a rod and reel. The information that is obtained form the making indicates that there is a hatchery return rate of about 3-4 percent (300-400/10,000) and the estimated return rate for the wild is 0.00017 percent (1/10,000).

The final stage at the hatchery is releasing. All the fish are taken back tot he rivers that their parents were taken from. A fish pump is used to suck out the fish from the raceways and put into tanks either on trucks or put into buckets attached to a helicopter. There is also a small percentage that are released through a pipe directly below the hatchery. They will be transported to back to the river where they will then swim out to the ocean to mature.