Currently browsing: Hatchery

Idaho Fish and Game reported last week a mortality event that resulted in about 33,000 young Chinook dying at the McCall Fish Hatchery in late July.

The Departments of Commerce and Interior Thursday (July 25) announced $240 million in funding to support Tribal hatcheries that produce Pacific salmon and steelhead.

A 26-year effort by the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes to build a salmon and trout hatchery in the upper Snake River basin got the go ahead from the Northwest Power and Conservation Council’s Fish and Wildlife Committee.

The Department of Commerce and NOAA have announced plans to allocate $60 million in funding to advance tribal priorities and address the impacts of climate change on Pacific salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River. These funds from the Infrastructure Law will also address deferred maintenance and repairs at Mitchell Act-funded hatchery facilities across the Columbia River Basin.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife announced that fall-run Chinook salmon fry released for the first time from its Fall Creek Fish Hatchery in Siskiyou County are presumed to have succumbed to gas bubble disease in the Klamath River.

In a presentation to update the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, the Yakama Nation says it will begin work at its existing spring Chinook salmon hatchery on southern Washington’s Klickitat River late summer this year, with construction extending out 18 months to March 2025.

The Bonneville Power Administration says it will spend each year more than five times the amount it has spent in recent years for non-recurring maintenance needs at existing hatcheries beginning next year.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is seeking public comment on a draft policy to guide management of hatcheries in cooperation with tribal co-managers.

This year, for the first time since 1956, no hatchery steelhead were released into Oregon’s Hood River basin. By 2025, except for a few hatchery strays, steelhead returns to the Hood River and its tributaries will be wild steelhead only.

An Oregon judge has granted a preliminary injunction that led to the release of hatchery summer steelhead smolts into the North Umpqua River Thursday (May 19) , reversing last month’s ruling by the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission.

Two California Department of Fish and Wildlife fish hatchery facilities in the eastern Sierra have recently detected an outbreak of Lactococcus petauri, a naturally occurring bacteria that sickens fish. Biologists speculate Pacific Flyway birds may have carried the disease from Mexican fish farms to the hatcheries.

In 2021, the Alaska commercial fleet caught 64 million hatchery-produced salmon worth an estimated $142 million dollars, with hatchery fish contributing 28 percent of the statewide commercial salmon harvest.

Due to an outbreak of bacterial gill disease, some 10.8 million juvenile fall chinook salmon have been released over the past week from U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Spring Creek National Fish Hatchery upstream of Bonneville Dam.

Frustrated with a lack of action by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, a coalition of conservation and fishing groups petitioned the state agency to cease planting summer steelhead smolts in Oregon’s North Umpqua River and to especially not plant summer steelhead smolts that originate from the damaged Cole Rivers Hatchery on the Rogue River near Medford, Ore.

A federal agency is in the process of transferring a fire-damaged salmon, steelhead and trout hatchery that it had scheduled for closure to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Some 140 million juvenile salmon and steelhead are released each year from Columbia and Snake river hatcheries with 97 million of the fish released from hatcheries upstream of Bonneville Dam.

In response to detection of IHN virus, Idaho Fish and Game hatchery staff at Magic Valley Fish Hatchery last week removed approximately 96,000 juvenile B-run steelhead from production. The IHN virus is not uncommon in southern Idaho fish, but the strain of the virus detected in the fish at the Magic Valley Hatchery is not known to be native to the area.

NOAA Fisheries is taking public comment on its proposal to issue an Endangered Species Act determination for the Clackamas Hatchery Spring Chinook Salmon program, which moved this year from a segregated to an integrated broodstock program. Natural-origin spring chinook salmon will be spawned at the hatchery to bolster the genetic diversity of the broodstock and reduce genetic divergence from the wild stock.

NOAA Fisheries is offering for public review and comment a proposal to issue Endangered Species Act determinations for hatchery operations in the Hood River, Touchet River, Umatilla River, and Deschutes River basins.

NOAA Fisheries is accepting comments on two proposed Endangered Species Act determinations for salmon hatchery operations in Yankee Fork and Panther Creek, upper Salmon River tributaries in central Idaho.

A panel of scientists completed this month its fourth review since 2012 of a master plan for Yakima River fisheries submitted by the Yakama Nation. The master plan describes a far-reaching plan to use hatcheries to boost tribal fisheries in the Columbia River.

Operators of the Hood River hatchery program want to increase the number of yearling spring chinook smolts by 40 percent, from 150,000 smolts released every year to 250,000 smolts, but a panel of scientists says it has more questions before the program should proceed.

Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife staff reviewed the findings of a recent report on hatchery reform at the state’s Fish and Wildlife Commission meeting Thursday, Feb. 6.

NOAA Fisheries has released for comment a Hatchery and Genetics Management Plan for the Wells Hatchery in the Upper Columbia River that would guide the additional production of up to one million subyearling summer chinook salmon to aid in orca recovery.

A groundbreaking ceremony is scheduled for Jan. 10 for the South Fork Walla Walla River Fish Hatchery about 10 miles east of Milton-Freewater, Oregon.

A Northwest tribe will begin construction of new hatchery rearing facilities for spring chinook salmon as soon as December in a first step to reintroduce the fish to the South Fork Walla Walla and Touchet rivers, both in the Walla Walla River basin.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Portland District, is seeking public comment on the draft Integrated Limited Reevaluation Report/Environmental Assessment for The Dalles and John Day Mitigation Program, which produces and releases hatchery fall chinook as mitigation for impacts to fisheries.