Soon after the dams were built on the Missouri River it became evident that the native fish populations were suffering. The native fish were used to a fairly warm muddy river. The dams created deep cold lakes separated by clear water, since the sediments dropped out to the bottom of the lakes. Fish that were used to migrating the length of the river could not. The hatchery was built to offset the loss. The hatchery uses the cold water of Sakakawea Lake, above the dam. Since it sits below the dam, all the water needed is gravity fed to the tanks, races and ponds, then flows into a wetland and from there through culverts and back into the river.
This is a quiet time of the year for the hatchery and although it was open for self-guided tours there was no one around.
The first room we entered was the tank room. There were rows and rows of bottles, where the fertilized fish eggs are hatched. Each quart jar can hold 60,000 northern pike eggs or 120,000 walleye eggs. The jars are connected by pipes to tanks where the fry will swim once they’re hatched.
From there the fry are stocked into outdoor ponds, now empty. The ponds are fertilized with alfalfa meal about two weeks before the fish are added. That promotes the growth of plankton, which feeds the fish. After about a month the fish are ready to stock in lakes in North Dakota and Wyoming. There are 64 ponds on the property. This hatchery produces about one million northern pike and ten million walleye fingerlings each year. It is the largest walleye production in the nation.
Not everything was empty. There were races with running water and fingerling fish that looked like muskellunge.
This race had these sturgeon, a pallid sturgeon and two shovelnose sturgeon.
There is a separate Sturgeon Building. The races you see here held thousands of rainbow trout.
The tanks had sturgeon. I believe these are pallid sturgeon. This is an endangered species, their normal migration to spawn has been interrupted by the dams. Every year wild adult pallid sturgeon are captured and spawn in the hatchery. The young are kept for a year and tagged before being released. Individuals can live 60 years. The hatchery has prevented the extinction of these fish.
There is also a Salmon Building. It is used for salmon and brown trout.
There were fish in both the raceways and the tanks, but I’m not sure what they were.
Two of the outdoor ponds had some water. We could see fish in the very shallow water of this pond. We don’t know what they were or why they were out there.
From the way they were jumping at this inlet pipe, they seemed like salmon.
We enjoyed looking around, but would have loved to have someone from the hatchery there to explain things. I guess that’s what we get for visiting in September.
On the Roam Again 