Life and Death

It was my first time sleeping in a tent in YEARS! It was chilly out but not unbearable, the cots were nice and we had warm sleeping bags.  Although I had good accomodations, I was not comfortable and I woke up a lot.  My cot was on the slightest incline.  Enough that I slid to the bottom of it repeatedly.  I awoke at 4 am, sure it was time to get up.  I had not been consuming the enormous amounts of coffee that I do in real life, so when I awoke, my head was pounding.  I didn't think I would be able to go back to sleep when I realized it was that early.  Jim gave me a couple Ibuprofin and he proceeded to get up.  He left me alone and I was able to squeeze another hour of sleep in.  I was not happy thinking about having a migraine on THIS day.

Around 6 am, a squirrel woke me up with some incessant chattering.  He must have been sitting outside my tent because it was so loud.  Thankfully my headache was now gone.  I meandered through the trees and went to the cabin to find that Chef was making some breakfast burritoes.  These guys really know how to eat out here!  After eating and getting my caffeine fix, we gathered up our waders and began work right away.

The first order of business was to check the traps and see if any new fish had arrived at the hatchery.  There were two in the trap below the holding tanks so we caught them, sorted them by sex and measured, and checked for various tags and then banded them.  After watching Chef do the first one, it was my turn.  These things were behemouths!! The two we caught were males and boy are they fiesty!  After successfully catching, measuring and checking for tags, the crazy fish slipped out of my hands.  I could tell that this was going to be some work.

Next order of business was to get in the tank with a large gate and crowd all the fish into a smaller space to help sort the ready females from the ready males.  There are two runs, one for males, one for females.  In the end we had 44 females that were ready and more than enough males.

Now it was time to get to work! By now, the rest of the crew had arrived at the hatchery, We had genetics researchers, fish health workers, surveyors, and many other people all there to get in on the action.  They walked us around the pit and explained what was going to happen, assigned everyone to a station and went through the first fish processing slowly so we would get a feel for it.  I was on the egg shuffling station.   The process went a little like this:

1. Take female from holding tank, kill her by conking her on the head with a steel pipe

2. Cut female and allow her to bleed out

3. Hang female, slice and remove eggs into a collander

4. Remove eggs from sac and take to the bucket station and put eggs in clean bucket (my job)

5. Take a male from holding tank, hold and milk the milt (semen) out of him (sort of like milking a cow) onto the eggs in the bucket

6. Add water to the bucket to start fertilization

7.  Wait for 1 min while the eggs are fertilized

8. Kill the male

9. After eggs have sat for one min, water is poured off and eggs placed into transport containers and placed   in an iodine bath

10.  Eggs are placed in a cooler and ready for transport back to the hatchery

Now some of these steps were happening simultaneously and I was able to do most of them.  I cut a female, milked a male, killed him, and did my egg shuffling.

I learned so much about all of this that it was truly an amazing educational experience.  I had no idea that it was as technical as it was, and that things had to be sanitized so much (iodine was used on everything!) There was to be NO cross-contamination of the females eggs, everything was labeled and numbered.  Samples were taken from both males and females for research.  If certain tags were found on any of the fish (coated wire tags in the snout) we had to cut off the snout and it would go back to the lab where it would be dug out and read.  Many of these fish had PIT tags, which are essentially a microchip similar to one a pet owner might have in their dog.  Some of these fish could be traced all the way back to the hatchery they were hatched at.  It is truly an amazing science.  Genetics with this has come so far that they can almost to a certainity trace the exact parantage of these fish. 

To know that these fish travelled for 8 months from the Pacific ocean to spawn and create new life is amazing.  These fish do not eat during this migrating time and the power they still have at the end of the journey is unbelievable.  Some of the fish return with many battle wounds from other fish or sea lions.  During this experience I realized that I knew little to nothing about these great fish, but I walked away with so much knowledge that I can't put a price on it.

After the blood bath, the carnage is documented, and all the fish that were killed will return to the surrounding rivers and streams.  After a fish spawns, they die.  They have no energy left to make the journey back and they have already left their progeny, so their purpose was served.  Since they naturally do not get back to the rivers when spawned manually, the workers take the carcasses and put them in the environment so they can decompose naturally and provide food and nutrients to the other animals and organisms that depend on it for survival.

The eggs at this point must be carefully handled, so after clean up there was no time to hang around, and we took off to the hatchery to deliver the eggs.  I now had a whole new set of questions for our now chef-turned-chauffeur again.  He probably thought we were done asking questions but now I think we had more than we did before we began.  When we got to the hatchery, the eggs were delivered to another person there and the eggs placed in an incubator.  Here the fish would stay for a year and  a half where in the Spring of 2012, the would return to the Powell station and placed down the fish ladder so they can imprint and know where to come in 2,3,or 4 years where they will spawn themselves. 

We took a small tour of the hatchery, and then loaded up to go back to Jim's house.  It was an exhausting day.  I enjoyed my entire time up there but was ready to get home.  I wish I had more time to relax out in the wilderness.  I didn't see any wild game, and I didn't really have much time to relax and just soak in the atmosphere, but I will definatly make some time to do that in the near future.

All in all, it was a wonderful experience and I will never forget it and the people that made it possible.  I felt a kinship with these people that only comes from sharing an experience that is done so for the respect of nature and for the sake of benefiting a species.  It is amazing how at this one place.. life ends for some, and thousands of lives begin.  A place of Life and Death.