((music)) My name is Neil Pugliese, I’m a hatchery
biologist here at the John D. Parker East Texas Fish Hatchery.
This hatchery is located in Brookeland, Texas, in East Texas.
I’ve been here almost four years now.
I’m a past graduate of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff; I went through their
master’s program and graduated in 2007.
We are basically responsible for raising fish for release into public waters, we don’t
do any private stockings.
This is all for the state.
This is the inside of our new hatchery building.
Behind us we have the hatching racks and holding tanks.
We raise largemouth and smallmouth bass here at this facility.
We also hold rainbow trout, which we have in our raceways right now for our winter stocking
program.
We raise blue catfish; we are the only hatchery in the state that has blue catfish brooders.
We also raise bluegill, channel catfish, and a lot of koi to feed all our broodfish.
This year for the first time, we are raising sunshine bass, which is a female white bass
with a male striper.
This year is the first time we’ve actually had spawning success, and we actually just
concluded that last week.
We stocked those fry last night.
That process starts with collecting the white bass females, and those all came from the
Sabine River just north of Toledo Bend.
The male stripers came from the Trinity River just below Lake Livingston in the tailrace.
Once we bring those fish into the building, we check them with a little glass tube.
We stick it into their vent and take some eggs out of the ovary and check to see what
stage of maturity they’re at.
Following that, they are injected with HCG and separated by how long we think it’s
going to take those fish to actually spawn.
They will be separate by fish ready within four hours, six hours, eight hours, ten and
twelve hours.
We periodically go back and check those fish.
When we get one we think is ready, we will turn it over on its back, and if eggs are
flowing freely, we will take them and strip them into a plastic container, making sure
there is no water touching those eggs.
If any water gets on those eggs, the water hardening process starts, and those eggs are
actually adhesive and stick to everything, and you can’t fertilize them as well, and
you can’t get them out of that plastic container to put them in a hatching jar.
So we try to make sure everything is dry, there is no water present, and after we are
done stripping those eggs into the plastic container, we bring a male striper over, dry
it off, and put that milt into the container with those eggs, stir it for a few minutes,
add water to it, stir it for a few more minutes, and after that we will put it in a hatching
jar.
To remove that stickiness on those bass eggs, we put them into a tannic acid solution.
They stay in it for about five to ten minutes, and while they are in there, there is air
rolling them constantly to try to make sure all the surfaces are exposed to the tannic
acid solution.
That will remove the adhesiveness of those eggs.
After that five or ten minute period is over, we turn the water on and begin to flush that
solution out of the jar to stop that process.
If you leave them in the tannic acid too long, the shells get hard, and the fry can’t hatch
out.
At that point it becomes a 24-hour operation.
Our crew is here night and day watching the eggs, going through and checking the water
flow, siphoning off dead eggs and just making sure there are no problems.
This is actually a recirculating system that we use, and the water is not flow-through,
so we have pumps, we have air compressors, and everything is running, and it needs to
be running all the time.
We have redundancies so if there is a problem we can turn it on, but if there’s not a
person here to watch that, anything is possible.
So we have to come together, work hard, be cooperative, and work a lot of really long
day, because as soon as those eggs go in the jars, no one leaves them alone until the fry
are in the ponds.
It takes about between 48 and 72 hours, depending on the temperature, for the fry to hatch out
of those eggs.
One of the biggest challenges with the sunshine bass project besides just getting the eggs
and getting them through being not adhesive and getting them to hatch is getting out into
a pond that is able to support them.
We’re doing this in early February, and the water temperatures are pretty cold here,
they’ve been averaging between 10 and 13 degrees Celsius, so for us the big question
was, How are we going to get enough food in these ponds for these fish to eat?
The normal chart that’s used for fertilization and when you are going to have peak rotifer
production aren’t really going to hold true, because the water temperature is so much colder
that you would normally do this at.
So we decided to fill our ponds roughly two weeks early, get them going.
We only filled them about a quarter of the way full and started fertilizing with cottonseed
meal.
Especially during this colder time of the year, we are kind of nervous about what zooplankton
production is going to be, and that’s something I actually wound up getting up really early
in the morning before sunup, I get up about 5:30, and since I live here at the hatchery,
it’s right out my front door, I go down to the ponds and start doing my zooplankton
sampling.
And I will continue to monitor zooplankton populations throughout the production process.
This facility has 64 ponds; they range in size from half-acre up to two acres; the two-acre
ponds right up here are where we have our blue catfish brooders.
These are smaller one-acre ponds we are driving by; those actually contain our smallmouth
bass brooders we got from Colorado.
We will start spawning these next month; we will bring them inside the building and let
them get acclimated and then raceway spawn those fish.
Now we’re heading over to one of the fry ponds for the sunshine bass that we stocked
yesterday.
We actually waited until late in the afternoon just as the sun was setting to make sure the
water was as warm as possible.
Thankfully we had a good warm afternoon, which helped to bring up the temperature.
One of the things we were really worried about besides getting zooplankton to grow was by
adding a lot of fertilizer was causing pH spikes in the afternoon, which is pretty bad
for the little fry, especially sunshine bass fry.
So we only filled this pond up a little less than half-way, so we have plenty of room to
flush in fresh water, so hopefully, by the time these fry get through their first couple
of weeks, when they are mostly eating just rotifers, and we get them to the point where
they are eating food, we can actually crank up the water, flush through there, so that
we don’t have any pH issues.
One last thing I really want to touch on in this little video clip is by the time you’ve
been a hatchery biologist, a lot of the day-to-day stuff you were used to doing as a technician,
you’re not really doing as much physical work anymore, and you wind up doing a lot
of paperwork.
I’m in charge of a credit card, and it comes with a huge amount of paperwork that you have
to keep up with.
There are reports you have to file, and things I need to give to the manager, and keeping
up with the budget.
You don’t realize as you progress in this field how much paperwork you will wind up
doing.
Getting organized at a young age, as you can see, anyone who went to grad school with me
can see my organizational skills haven’t improved very much.
That’s one of the things you need to be thinking about.
I spend a lot of time in here on the computer entering data, keeping up with our stocking
reports and trip sheets, and it’s something you don’t really think about, especially
when you’re younger in this field, that at some point in your career you will make
that transition from doing other, more fun fish-related stuff and actually becoming more
of an office type guy, and here at Texas Parks and Wildlife, I think I’ve finally crossed
that line.
((University of Arkansas fight song))