eakfield said he doesn’t even have to check them.
“All the bucks are ready to go,” he said.
Dozens of freshly collected king salmon eggs fill a heavy plastic bag at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's hatchery on Crooked Creek in Kasilof during an "egg take" by department employees. More than 100,000 eggs will be collected there this summer and then trucked to a facility at Fort Richardson, where they will be raised for release into the Kasilof River and Sport Lake.
Fish determined ready to spawn are then humanely euthanized, and the creamy, white milt of males and the translucent, cherry-colored eggs of females are harvested by milking them into a five-gallon bucket. The spawning ratio is one to one, with three females and three males milked per bucket.
“We squirt the milt of a buck into the bottom of the bucket, then we put in eggs from three hens, then the milt of two more bucks on top,” Breakfield said.
The average number of eggs produced by a female is roughly 5,900, according to Breakfield. “This year we have some really good hens, though, so the average was around 6,600 eggs per hen, and we did egg-takes on 27 hens, so we’ll probably end up with around 178,200 eggs total.”
Once milt and eggs are in the bucket, they are carefully mixed to further ensure fertilization. Then water is swirled into the bucket to harden the eggs. This water comes from the Fort Richardson State Fish Hatchery near Anchorage, where the fertilized eggs are then shipped.
“Using water from Fort Richardson ensures that disease can’t be transferred to the hatchery if there is any present in the water at Crooked Creek,” Breakfield said.
At Fort Richardson, the eggs are put into incubators to hatch into young salmon called alevins that have big, bloated yolk sacks dangling from their abdomens.
Once these yolk sack reserves are absorbed, the young fish become fry and are transferred to outdoor holding pens where they are fed and continue to grow to roughly 5 grams in weight and between four and five inches in length, at which point they have their adipose fins clipped, are tagged and transferred back to the Crooked Creek facility.
“Around 105,000 a year come back down. We’ll see the fish from the eggs we just collected back again for release in spring of 2008,” Breakfield said.
Once returned to the Crooked Creek facility, the young fish are kept in a holding pond for seven days before being released. This is done to imprint them to Crooked Creek so the fish can home in on these waters when they return in a few years to spawn as adults.
“We wouldn’t want hatchery-produced fish going up the Kenai (River) or into other rivers where they could potentially alter the genetics of the fish populations in those systems,” he said.
Breakfield said this is one of the reasons for clipping the adipose fin of hatchery-produced chinooks. It ensures that any hatchery-produced fish, should they stray from Crooked Creek or the Kasilof River, can be quickly and easily identified.
Breakfield said the clipped fins also help sport fishermen differentiate hatchery-produced chinooks from their wild counterparts for the purpose of complying with regulations, since the latter are only allowed to be retained a few days a week.
“Our sustainable escapement goal for Crooked Creek is 650 to 1,700 wild fish,” Breakfield said, but added that achieving this goal without exceeding it can often be challenging.
Breakfield said in 2004 roughly 2,500 hatchery-produced kings and 2,500 wild kings passed through the weir at Crooked Creek during the early run. In 2005, roughly 1,100 hatchery-produced fish and 1,903 wild fish came through. In 2006, more than 400 hatchery-produced fish and more than 1,000 wild fish had passed through the weir by mid-July.
In the short run, some fishermen have benefited from these strong returns of salmon, based on Fish and Game harvest surveys.
“Mostly it’s the Kasilof sportsfishermen that benefit from it. It’s how they were allowed to keep either a hatchery or wild fish three days a week this year as opposed to two,” Breakfield said.
Breakfield said tha