Hey guys welcome to the New Hampton hatchery. my name is Scott Phinney and I'm the hatchery manager.
I'm Becca. I'm a Fish Culturist here in New Hampton. Chris Perkins, also a Fish Culturlist, Zach Newcity, also a Fish Culturist. Matt Lee also a Fish Culturist.
Today we're going to be uh showing you girls and guys how we spawn the brook trout. We've got some
males and female brook trout here. We're going to kind of show you the different characteristics of
the two the males and the females. We're going to show you the techniques that we use to take
the eggs and fertilize the eggs and we're just going to take it right through the stages so
sit back and enjoy and have fun.
What we've got here for you is we've got two brook trout in here Rome strain. We've got a
male brook trout and a female brook trout. As you can see he's quite a bit larger than the females
but if you look at the body, the body style you see how these look more a little bit like a football
they kind of got the big hunch back, they got the pointy nose, they got the kype starting to show
which is the hook jaw, which is obviously a usually a male characteristic. You can see how
that's starting to grow out. Usually after a fish becomes two years old that will get bigger and
bigger as the fish goes along. Now his colors are a little bit brighter than the female he's got the
real real white white fins on the end, he's got the real red belly. Tip him over he's got the black and
black and white belly there. One way good way to tell is looking at the nose the nose and the jaw
of the male is a is a pretty easy way you can see they have a pointier nose.
Next to the female
you see it's a lot more rounded off and then the body shape is a lot thicker side to side. just a
big belly full of eggs and you know she'll be... how many eggs of these have?
Twenty five hundred to three thousand a fish usually. So what you what you do to collect the eggs basically
you kind of hold them like so if you're a righty and the eggs will come right out of the vent here
um so generally what we'll do we'll stage a bucket right here and then just kind of apply
steady pressure down the belly toward the vent and then you'll start to see the eggs squirt out.
Well right now they're flopping in the flopping table right now and what this is doing is making
them tired. They're not getting injured this way they're just getting a little tired so they're
easier to handle for us because if we pick them up right now they'll be flopping we'll drop them
we don't really want to drop them. We're going to grab a female first put the eggs in a bucket then
we'll come over and grab the males and put the milt in the bucket.
After you're done, you got the eggs in there easy way to tell if you look at the female's belly it looks like a deflated balloon
that's how we know that she has no more eggs to give and you kind of can feel the eggs inside too
but once they're all done put them in the tank over here to separate them
then we come over and we grab the mail easy way that kype. a little bit of a squeeze you
can see the white, that's milt coming out, that's going to fertilize the eggs
and then he's all done then we separate him take our eggs and we just give them
a little bit of a swirl to get all that milt through all the eggs to fertilize all of these.
Now if you guys look in here you can see how the the milt is floating around on there touching all
the eggs so it gets good fertilization what i'm doing here is after the guys have them
all fertilized and we put them up here we kind of let them sit for about 15 minutes or so we
want to make sure that that milt touches all the eggs so that everything can be fertilized.
What I'm doing here is I've got my brood spoon and I'm taking a sub sample of each
batch that we take. Now the reasoning for that is that these fish as we stock them
out as we use them are going to be going to need to be replaced so by taking a sub sample
of these fish it kind of gives us the best genetics the best out of each fish that we take.
Nice and fertilized I just want to take it like kind of right from the middle and that's my sub sample
I keep them separated for our brood and that will be the fish that you'll see here in the
next three years they'll be the ones that that we're taking the eggs from.
Becca's inside and she's got some iodine tubs in there the next process from here we've got our
first take we're going to take it inside we're going to disinfect all these eggs make sure
they're clean they're free of parasites clean of any disease or anything like that
and then we're going to water harden them and we'll put them in the water hardening tubs and
Becca will show you guys that whole that whole process so follow me and we'll show you this next.
How are ya got some eggs for ya.
When the eggs first come in from the hatchery from outside we have to record the time
that they come in and so i have a set up sheet and so at the end we'll mark the number of
females number of males same kind of sheet that they're collecting out there but I need
to record the time they come into the hatchery and then a couple other stages along the way
so I've got to make sure I get that when they first come in.
And then I'll take the lid off and then take the brood out and over here I have iodine solution
made up and what that does is it's going to wash all the excess milt and ovarian fluid off of the
eggs because that will allow them to water harden properly so I'll take them over the strainer and
I've got up and I'll just rinse the iodine it's watered down iodine there's a specific formula
that we follow. So I'll just give them a rinse just to make sure the fluid comes off
and then they'll go right into the bath and sit there and then I'll take batches of these eggs.
And you got to be really gentle with them you don't want to pop any of the shells
or cause any of them to get squished or anything so you just kind of do them in batches.
And it's going to be the same thing I just did to the brood so we're just going to wash them off.
Kind of get enough liquid in there to kind of suspend all the eggs enough to cover them all.
And then I just give them a light roll you don't need to be too hard with it it's just to kind
of make sure that all the ones that were stuck together kind of get some of that iodine on them.
And then this bucket that they went into actually has a strainer bottom so that I can get rid of the
iodine wash. So then I'll just take these guys hold them over the bucket and then using this
same wash I'll just kind of put them in there, splash them down make sure they get in the pool.
Definitely not a job you can stay dry at.
So then before I put this back in the bucket I don't want any of this
excess fluid or anything going on to the next batch so I'll just dump it.
I won't give it a rinse or anything because again I'm doing batches so
and this is the strainer bottom we have so again I'll just continue to kind of wash them
be really gentle with them. So then for this one we keep our brood separate so the brood fish are
future brood fish are in the tubes. I'll actually lay them down in the compartment over here
and the eggs go into the water hardening tub it doesn't matter which section you put them in it's
just you don't want to put too many in there because if there's too much weight in there
the ones on the bottom don't do as well. And you can squish them because they're
so sensitive right now. So you should just put one bucket basket to keep it simple.
And after they've soaked this iodine you can start to see the ones that are turning white
which are the dead eggs and any shells that formed you can really see them once they're
laid down in the water hardening tub. So now these guys, we'll record the time again and then we'll
leave them in there for two hours to get a little bit more of a hard shell.
The next step after we water harden is to do the Von Baer reading
and what i'm going to do is i'm going to dip it in the trough and then i'm going to
line up a series of eggs it's going to be a single row no overlap and no water in it
and i'll do a count and i'll do it three times and then we have a chart that tells us based off the
number of eggs in there how many eggs per ounce so that when we do our conversion and lay them down
we'll get an estimate of how many eggs we actually have. Get a scoop
and then i usually just hold my finger over it stop the eggs from falling out.
And then I'll move over to the table where there's light and then line them up.
Go back over and scoop out the extras.
And then once they're in a row and there's no gaps then I'll just count them. 34.
If you just go where you got the size so it's 34. Then that tells you that there's
381 eggs per ounce. And then I'll just scoop some out
and then drop them in.
Yeah puts me about 18 so I'll need a little bit more.
That one's at 24.
Perfect, 22.
New Hampton basically takes the eggs at their facility. We try to get one of the
last batches of eggs that they have. They may spawn over four to eight week period,
we want to make sure that we're getting either the second to the last or the last batch of eggs.
The idea for that is again with temperature everything kind of varies so the colder the water is the
longer we can actually hold those eggs. And here we've got probably some of the coldest water in
the state. We get down to around 36 or 38 degrees so that hatch house basically is able to hold on
to those eggs a little bit longer which works better for the trout in the classroom program.
Otherwise the the eggs start hatching out probably sometime it's February and the way
we do it right now we're basically able to get it probably buy them another six weeks worth of time
so that they're hatching out a little bit later so that teachers can release the eggs,
now fish, into those brooks and streams and other water bodies sometime in May or June.
Once we get the eggs here we're picking them daily we're getting rid of any mortality and there's
certain times of the year where we're going to get bigger spikes than others. Towards the end
we might only get like a half a dozen eggs per day. Right now we're getting somewhere between two and
300 a day. We have to make sure that we're picking those eggs of mortality every day getting rid of
any potential mortalities that are going to cause any kind of fungus issues because that one egg is
going to kill 10 eggs today and then tomorrow it's going to kill 100 it just spreads like wildfire.
So even though you may not have a lot of dead eggs in there if you don't pick your mortality
it's going to spread to your good eggs and cause your good eggs to have a high mortality.
We're picking them every day we're checking temperature every day, I'm looking at the
developmental index probably about once a week, which is what the trout in the classroom uses
but we're looking at the developmental index to say okay, well the eggs are eyed enough that
we can basically start to shock them and then get them ready to be shipped out to the kids.
And that's basically you know the the gist of it. It's not like it's very in-depth but
it's just a lot of daily maintenance. It might only take us like 10-15 minutes a day
but without that daily maintenance we could lose everything and that's not why we're here.
So the next stage in development and what happens in the incubator trays
is they are eye eggs at this point so you can see the eyes of the brook trout have developed.
you can kind of see the black two little black dots forming there
and then the next stage is the development of the fry inside the egg.
So you can start to see the formation of the fish from the eyes to the back to the tail.
And then our next stage is sac fry when they hatch out. So you'll be able to see the orange
bright orange sac and that's their food source so they'll feed off that as they continue to develop.
And then we have these are still sac fry but they're at a later stage.
Pretty soon they'll lose that or it becomes very
minimal and then we'll pond them into the raceway tanks.
you