Fish and Wildlife
Successful stocking season
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Walleye fry at four days old. |
Craig Copeland chuckles when he’s asked how it feels to be the father of more than 50 million children.
“I don’t know if I’d want to father that many kids,” he says.
Copeland is manager of the Cold Lake Fish Hatchery, which is located about 300 km northeast of Edmonton near the Saskatchewan border. The enormous number of children he’s referring to is the record number of baby walleye (called fry) stocked by the hatchery in June: a whopping 50.1 million tiny fish – each only about four millimetres in size. At that stage of life, each baby fish resembles a tiny pin with two black eyes and attached to its belly hangs a yolk sac for food.
“This is the highest number of fry we’ve ever produced in one year,” says Copeland with pride.
The 50.1 million fish hatched from the 84 million wild eggs collected by fisheries staff in May from Bistcho Lake (in the far northwestern corner of Alberta) and Primrose Lake (just north of Cold Lake along the Alberta-Saskatchewan border). The millions of eggs were airlifted by helicopter from these lakes to the Cold Lake Fish Hatchery where, after a 25-day incubation period, they hatched.
Most of the baby fish – nearly 45 million – were then transported by tanker trucks and deposited in Lac La Biche, which is the focus of the walleye fry stocking efforts. “We used to put the fry into several lakes,” says Copeland. “But now the focus is to restore a walleye fishery on Lac La Biche.”
Copeland adds that if the efforts to build up the walleye population in the lake are successful, “it will be quite the fishery in 10 years.”
Some of the fry were returned to Bistcho and Primrose lakes as “donor stocking” in order to maintain the health of the fish stocks in those lakes. Bistcho welcomed nearly 1.4 million baby fish, whereas Primrose received 2.4 million.
The remaining fry were stocked into “grow-out” ponds at the hatchery and in the Cold Lake area in order to raise the fry to a larger size. Walleye grow very fast - four centimetres per month – when pond conditions are ideal. The fish reach five centimeters in length in July and 12 centimetres by September. The Cold Lake Fish Hatchery recently stocked Sylvan Lake with more than 395,000 five-centimetre fingerlings, and is gearing up for a fall stocking program that will hopefully see another 50,000 fingerlings stocked at a lake yet to be determined.
