Yesterday afternoon started out innocently enough. Each month, one family chooses a theme for Monday PE. This month we are doing geocaching. It qualifies as PE because we hike and scramble to find the treasure. Sadly, we couldn't find the geocache box. What we did find was this:
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| Desperate for Hatchery Chum |
The fence marks Department of Fish and Wildlife property. The rope line with the buoys is the absolute limit to where they can fish the river. There is a camera to record if someone tries to fish under the buoys. I have no idea why anyone would want to fish for hatchery chum so close to the end of their journey (I'm such a salmon snob, I won't even buy chum in the store). When they catch a fish, they leave the head, tail, and guts right there on the bank. They toss their cigarette butts on the ground. The seagulls are everywhere. It was pretty gross.
My friend happened to find a hatchery employee and he gave us a tour! So our failed PE class turned into a science field trip. I love that. The first thing we saw was:
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| The End of the Road |
All the dark in the water is fish. Lots and lots of fish with nowhere to go. They do lift 10,000 over so they can be "wild" and spawn naturally upstream. The rest are diverted into the holding tanks until they are ready to provide their goods. The extras are sent to a factory that uses the fish for meal and fertilizer and they also take the rest of the eggs to sell to Japan. The eggs etc that are kept go here:
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| Brooding Tanks |
This hatchery raises more than just chum. They also raise chinook! Now that's a tasty salmon.
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| Eggs, getting ready to hatch |
This was a really fun part of the field trip. One would think that I, having an entire degree devoted to fishy things, would know everything about how hatcheries run. But I have never stepped foot into one until this day. (People who got hatchery degrees went to the tech school for two years-I went to university and read, wrote, and pondered about fish. One doesn't have to actually touch a fish to get a university degree.)
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| Fish growth |
This is the part of the tour where I started to get embarrassed about how much my kids don't really know about what their dad does for a living. S kept asking if the fish in the bottles were alive. Maybe if we had kept our fish collection when we moved, he wouldn't ask that question. But then the real fun started. We went to another building where they had frozen things to hold:
This guy knew how to give a school tour! Show them the cool things. Don't tell them to much. Answer the moms' questions. And give them big frozen dead things to play with. A perfect field trip!
