Spawn camp

After two years of schooling I have landed a pretty wicked summer job. I will be working out at Echo lake for the summer at the provincial fish hatchery. Lake side living and fishing every single day. Close enough to Regina to take in everything worth going to but far enough away to stay out of trouble. Right now we are full on involved in spawn camp. This year we are capturing fish in live net traps on Pasqua lake. Here we are mostly after ripe female walleye but have been taking the odd northern pike as well. What we are doing is taking the eggs from the females, adding sperm from the male walleye and taking them back to the hatchery to rear them under controlled conditions. At the hatchery we are able to obtain around a 60-70% success rate with the eggs while in the wild it may be closer to 1%. When the fry hatch they are taken throughout the province and released in waters that need help with their walleye populations. You might as well call me a fish jerker offer. There is often a lot of by-catch in the nets. Sometimes this can be a real bother like when you have to search through 1500 one pound carp to find twenty female walleye but sometimes you get to see some pretty cool fish specimens. In here there is a picture of a channel catfish, the biggest one any of these fishery biologists have seen in the province and likely bigger than the Saskatchewan angling record. We did not weigh or measure it, perhaps we should have. My coworkers believe that a lot of cat fish found their way through the qu'appelle valley from the assinaboine river during the high water last year. Here is a little video of my coworkers sorting through the fish, looking for the ones that are ready for some action.

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