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Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Beginning Our Work at the Salmon Hatchery

One of our first projects was to assemble 34 new fish feeders for the outdoor tanks. The fry are being moved to the outdoor tanks soon. The new feeders, purchased from Finland, must be in place before the fish are transferred outside. After assembly we moved the new feeders to the outdoor "Big Top" tank area for installation.

Every morning starts with cleaning the 56 fry tanks. This job is usually shared with all staff who are available. After opening a valve to allow outflow,  we clean the screens and waste on the bottom of the tank and net any dead fry and remove them. The outflow allows a sort of vacuuming effect for clearing the waste. After cleaning a tank, we close the valve and record the number of dead fry (fish) removed.


The dark blotches in the bottom of the tank are masses of salmon fry. Each tank contains approximately 20,000 fish. As time passes the tank gets crowded, so some are gradually moved to the larger outside tanks for the remainder of their time at the hatchery. They won't be released to the Penobscot River until next Spring.

After we finish cleaning the tanks, we are responsible for hand feeding the brood stock. These are the nearly adult salmon which will be used to spawn next years hatchery fry.

 

STEPHEN KING HOUSE - BANGOR, ME

We discovered Stephen King's primary residence is here in Bangor. We had to drive by and check it out.  A trunk of a tree in the side yard was carved into an interesting sculpture. The eye-catching red Victorian-style mansion features bats, spiders, and a web on its front gates.


 

3 comments:

Mark & Teri said...

Interesting that they are getting new feeders for the outdoor tanks. We spent many hours cleaning those old galvanized feeders, and they had definitely seen better days! They had been using a single "demo" plastic feeder on one outdoor tank the two years that we were there, and the staff's opinions of it were mixed. Strongly mixed...

Teri said...

Food in, food out. It’s a never-ending cycle!
Have yall volunteered at a fish hatchery before?

D. Naville said...

That is very cool, being the seed to oodles of joy/food to fishermen, bears and other critters! I never would have guessed it was on such a grand scale.