SWEET SPRINGS, Mo. (AP) - A splash breaks the steady sound of rushing water. Two men stand in a large tub of water as the noise echoes off the walls of the Blind Pony Hatchery. The men are wrestling a 5-foot-long fish into their arms, holding on tightly to its oar-shaped snout.
Every spring during spawning season, Missouri Department of Conservation biologists harvest eggs from the paddlefish at Blind Pony Hatchery in Sweet Springs, a town along Interstate 70 about halfway between Columbia and Kansas City.
Paddlefish live in Missouri’s lakes and rivers. Nathan Storts, hatchery manager at Blind Pony Hatchery, told the Columbia Missourian that the building of dams and reservoirs have destroyed the paddlefish’s natural habitat. The fish do not have enough places to spawn. He says the species cannot sustain itself, as the demand for recreational paddlefish fishing is larger than the natural reproduction rate of the wild fish.
“If we want a recreational fishery, we need to supplement their populations,” said Darby Niswonger, fisheries management biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation.
The spawning process occurs from the end of March to the beginning of May. Biologists inject female paddlefish with a hormone to artificially prepare the fish to release their eggs. After about a day and a half, the hatchery team checks females every half hour to see if they are ready to drop their eggs. This is when two biologists climb into the tank and wrestle their arms around a fish that could weigh anywhere between 30 to 70 pounds. They lift the fish into the air as another pair of biologists wait with towels. The trick is the eggs cannot touch water until they are ready to be fertilized. Once the underbelly is dry, a fifth biologist attempts to catch the released eggs in a bowl.
A female paddlefish might drop its eggs right away, but other times the process drags on.
“We’ve been here until midnight and 1 a.m. checking fish and waiting for eggs,” Storts said.
Each paddlefish can release between 100,000 and 500,000 eggs throughout the spawning process. After the fertilized eggs gestate for one week, the newly hatched paddlefish remain at the Blind Pony Hatchery throughout the summer. In the fall, the Missouri Department of Conservation releases an average of 40,000 paddlefish fingerlings into rivers, lakes and reservoirs.
“It’s actually a pretty big event here,” Storts said. “We call in help from all the different hatcheries from around the state.”
Paddlefish populations across Missouri rely on the yearly stock brought in by the Missouri Department of Conservation. The department also sets limits on recreational fishing to maintain local populations. Snagging season for paddlefish in Missouri lakes and reservoirs began March 15 and remains open until April 30. The spring season for the Mississippi River extends to May 15.
“There’s a lot of people that don’t know the ins and outs of what we do,” Niswonger said. “They think that fish just show up. There’s a lot more that goes into being able to catching fish than just putting the hook in the water.”
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Information from: Columbia Missourian, http://www.columbiamissourian.com
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