Good day to all those that support the
Peter Gray Parr Project in one way or another and welcome to the May
Peter Gray Hatchery update. May is busssssssssssyyyyyyyy. There is smolt trapping, fry emerging from substrate incubation boxes, moving fish into the hatchery expansion for the first time, tearing down substrate incubation boxes, taking care of the Pleasant River Hatchery, stocking of fry, etc, etc! That being said the Italian poet Torquato Tasso put it this way, "
The day of fortune is like a harvest day, We must be busy when the corn is ripe." May in the Atlantic salmon conservation hatchery world is a month the corn is ripe!
It has been a damp, cool spring which has kept river temperatures a bit lower then usual and some migrations of sea run fish delayed a week or two. We haven't minded the cooler river temps and plenty of water in the river as that is good for the salmon in the
Peter Gray Hatchery as well as the salmon already out in the rivers. As of this morning, June 4th, the river is running around 14 Celsius (57 Fahrenheit)...this time of year it could just as easily be approaching 20 Celsius (68 Fahrenheit).
In great news we now have hundreds of thousands of salmon fry inhabiting the tanks of the Peter Gray Hatchery expansion. This has been years in the making and we'd like to thank all those that have helped this vision come to a reality! There are a few pictures of the expansion included in this report. Currently, we have over 300,000 salmon that are on their way to becoming "little athletes".
2019 Smolt Trapping
New smolt captures: 193
Peter Gray Hatchery Origin: 176
Wild (or naturally reared) Origin: 17
Recaptures: 38
As we discussed in the last hatchery update we have our 2019 smolt trapping season under way. For more information on smolt trapping please read that hatchery update
here or check out our
website. We are continuing to catch smolts headed to the Atlantic Ocean. With 8 new smolts today our total is 193 new captures so far this year. Hopefully we continue to capture smolts for another week or so.
To give a little perspective, last season we captured 197
smolts (the second highest amount for the
Peter Gray Parr Project) and the estimated number of smolt leaving the system was around 1200 smolts (including production below the trap). Those results and a graph showing them can be seen
here.
Pleasant River Hatchery
With the help of some cub scouts, pod casters, and Maine DMR we recently stocked out over 100,000 fry from our
Pleasant River Hatchery. Thank you to all that lent a hand and the landowners for access to the river. Check out the photos included in this update to see some of the places we stocked. We don't yet have the resources to raise parr at the Pleasant River Hatchery, but we do utilize certain aspects of the
Peter Gray method to include using unfiltered river water in the hatchery and substrate incubation boxes to rear the alevin. The
Downeast Salmon Federation has been raising Atlantic salmon at our Columbia Fall's facility since the early 1990s.
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