“I’ve been the instructor and hatcher manager here for 33 years,” Steele says, in an office painted with documents and maps of fish populations. The Whatcom Creek Hatchery was established in 1976, and Maritime Heritage Park was established two years later to boost area salmon populations.
Chum, coho, and chinook salmon are all native to the Whatcom creek area. Hatcheries spawn fish based on what species are native to the area in order to avoid negative impact on the existing fish population.
“We released 1.1 million chinook salmon a year at one point, but politics changed that,” Steele says.
Although chinook salmon are on the endangered species list, Steele is not allowed to spawn them due to federal restrictions.
“We haven’t raised fall chinook here for about six years. The federal government stepped in and told us not to spawn anymore, because they may stray and go into the nooksack river. Then they could spawn with spring chinook and create a hybrid, which could potentially mess up their genetics.” Steele says.Regulations are imposed by a yearly “brood document”, which determines target fish production goals and imposes restrictions on the production of certain species of fish.
“The state has recently told us not to spawn anymore coho salmon, which is a problem because this is a college program and we want as many species as possible,” Steele says. “I think some of the tribes and the state are still battling over that.”
The educational impacts are not the only concern for Steele, as coho population can be impacted significantly by both commercial and sport fishing.
“Whatcom creek was dead when I started here. There are a lot of coho now, but fishing pressure would eliminate the entire coho stock within a cycle or two,” Steele says.Steele doesn’t have to leave his office to how popular fishing is in this area, and knows how quickly salmon populations can dwindle.
“We get about 200 people down here fishing at a time in the Fall,” Steele says.
All of the work at the hatchery is done by students taking the fisheries program at Bellingham Technical College. Steele also manages the hatchery at Whatcom Falls Park.
“That’s where we spawn rainbow trout, which isn’t for the state but for our own projects,” Steele says.
Spawning and raising fish is a multi-layered process, beginning with the fertilization of eggs.
“Female salmon are cut open to get the eggs,” says Bellingham Technical College student Fernando Martinez. “Then you have to squeeze the male salmon to get the milt, which contains the sperm. The eggs are kept in trays until they hatch into alevins, which is a fish with the yolk sack attached.”
Fish are killed after spawning because they will die anyways as a result of spawning. The carcasses are then donated to a company which processes the fish and then distributes them to local food banks. The amount of time it takes for a fish to mature after hatching depends on the species.
“Coho and steelhead trout need a year and a half to mature, pink salmon take about 60 days and chum salmon take about 30 days,” Steele says.
The survival rate of fish spawned in a hatchery is much higher than in the wild. Of every 3,000 eggs fertilized in the wild, 300 make it past the egg stage, while 2,700 eggs successfully hatch in the hatchery. Only 2 of every 3,000 eggs in the wild survives to become a spawning adult while roughly 20 hatchery salmon become adults, although this number can vary tremendously.
“I’ve seen returns as low as 0.1 percent before and as high as 3 percent, but typically we see a 0.7 percent return,” Steele says. The hatchery produces roughly three million fish per year, putting the spawning adult fish return totals as low as 3,000 and as high as 90,000.
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