Leadville National Fish Hatchery

Transcription

[ Background Sounds ] [ Music ] >> Salmon and steelhead are iconic. They're the subject of tribal customs and cultures, and have been for thousands of years. A hatchery system just isn't a place where we raise fish; it's a community resource. It's a community asset ensuring that there are fish that can be caught by an angler or a tribe. >> And this is very important not only to the tribes, but to the local anglers, and to sport fishermen throughout the Pacific Northwest, and this whole community comes alive with fishermen that travel just to come here. >> And that translates into you know dollars and jobs into our communities. >> The sports fishermen and the ocean love our fish and the fish are still nice and silver by that time. >> We are using the best available science and hatchery in just about everything that we do. Spawning season is a great point in time during the year where you see teamwork that exists all year. We get the adults coming through, check the coded wire tags, and then fish health is available to monitor the health status of fish. >> Quite a few of us are fish doctors; we're taking care of the fish at the Federal hatcheries and at tribal fish hatcheries as well. We do diagnostic visits, and we also do inspections of the adults. I'm very proud of the fish that we do have coming out of our hatcheries. >> Our Abernathy Tech Center identified that fish that are produced by the hatchery is as closely related to a wild fish stock as possible. >> To put it simply, we do research. The research behind how you propagate fish. >> The state of the art technology helps us to better understand a population; how related they are to each other, how does hatchery influence wild? >> The main stem Columbia use to provide hundreds of miles of free-flowing river and spawning habitat. When the dams were created, the available spawning habitat was dramatically reduced, therefore the production of fish dramatically reduced. >> We still need hatcheries today because the fish passages on some of these dams are not always that great, and so when the salmon are here we have traditions. We have culture. We have practices that are along the Columbia River that will always be there because it's part of our history. >> And honestly, in our part of the world we can't function without a viable hatchery system. The hatchery can be vital to conserving and even restoring declining populations, and even threatened or endangered populations of fish. [ Silence ]