Newsletter: February 2023
Wrapping Up Winter in the Hatchery
It always feels like wintertime at Conservation Fisheries will be slow, and somehow every year we manage to keep things exciting around the hatchery. With most of our tanks empty after releasing our reared fishes into the wild or transferring them to other facilities, we have the ability to do some much needed improvements and construction around the building.
Front half of the new Live Culture Room
Our biggest project this winter has been transforming our Live Culture Room, also referred to as the Food Room or the Green Room. In this room, we culture small, live foods to feed to our fishes. Live food offers more complex micronutrients than our frozen and flake foods, and also helps to keep the predatory instinct alive and well in our captive fishes. Some of the live food that we culture includes Brine Shrimp, Ceriodaphnia, and Grindal Worms.
The Live Culture Room that we’ve been using in our building for the last 20 years is 108 square feet and hallway-shaped. In this room we had been culturing 10 different live food species. The amount of live food we could produce in this room met the basic needs of our fish, but we had a vision to be able to feed out even more live food daily. Our new Live Culture Room is 174 square feet and more square-shaped. We’re culturing the same species (soon to be a few more), and are able to increase the number of cultures for each species, and plan to triple the size of our culture containers that they are produced in. With these changes, we estimate producing 3-4x the amount of live food that we’ve produced in the past. This will more than meet the needs of our fishes, even at peak times of the year when we have near to 10,000 larval fishes living and growing in the hatchery.
Leopard Darter in the wild; photo by Dustin Lynch
Another incredible upgrade that we’ve been able to begin is replacing the steel racks that in the Main Hatchery that hold our hundreds of fish tanks. We received funding from The JEM Project that allowed us to purchase new, galvanized steel racks to replace all all racks in our Main Hatchery. It’s one of the most exciting upgrades we’ve started to make, and one that will hold up for many, many years!
Early this year we said goodbye to our Yellowcheek Darters, as our project working with them ended and we sent them back to Arkansas. Yellowcheek Darters are federally listed as an Endangered species, and are native to the Little Red River system in Arkansas. Their closest relative in the hatchery is the Boulder Darter, as they are both in the Nothonotus genus of the darter family.
Yellowfin Madtom t-shirt, available for pre-order until 2/14
Our newest fish to the hatchery is the Leopard Darter! These darters are also native to the Little River system in Arkansas and into Oklahoma. Leopard Darters are the first species we’ve ever worked with that is native to Oklahoma, which adds another state to our ever-growing list of states where our work is making a difference. For now, our project for this species is focused on creating propagation protocols.
Lastly, Conservation Fisheries has launched our most recent fish t-shirt fundraiser! It features the Yellowfin Madtom, photographed by Joel Sartore of National Geographic, and was designed by a local Knoxville artist, Graveflwr. This t-shirt is pre-order only, and the last day to order will be February 14th. Shipping notifications will go out sometime in March.
With all of these exciting winter happenings under our belt, biologists at Conservation Fisheries are looking forward to spawning season and all of the exciting things that come along with springtime in the hatchery.
As always, we at Conservation Fisheries are grateful for your constant support and interest in the crucial conservation work that we do everyday. We love hearing from you, so please keep the questions and outreach coming!
- The CFI Team