The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s (FWS) Valley City Fish Hatchery has been host to a
number of notable fish species which are raised from eggs and fry up to stockable
fingerling sizes each spring and summer. From more common sportfish such as
walleyes and pike, to a notable tiger muskie program in the 1990s, a wide variety of
species have come through the hatchery from season-to-season. This year, the facility
will play host to perennial angles favorites as well as some new ones which will be
raised from eggs on up to fish measuring a few inches long including walleyes, lake
sturgeon, and new this season, channel catfish, according to Chris Hooley, FWS
Hatchery Manager.
“Last week we got in 220 brood channel catfish that went out into the ponds from Lake
Oahe. Walleye eggs will be showing up next week and they’ll be rolling around the jars
for probably five to seven days and they’ll be hatching out and headed to the ponds.
Then probably next week some time we’ll be headed to the Rainy River in Minnesota to
do some lake sturgeon spawning and bringing the eggs back here to hatch them out
and grow them up,” Hooley details.
Catfish rearing at the hatchery is a new endeavor for the staff working the ponds, by
which those fish taken from Lake Oahe are provided items of underwater structure such
as metal boxes and milk cans around which to spawn. By late June or early July, staff
will be able to harvest the eggs from the pond and place them in the hatching jars within
the buildings similar to the way walleye eggs are hatched earlier in the season. Once
old enough, the catfish fry will be placed back in the ponds and allowed to mature until
October, when they’ll be stocked in select waters around the area with significant
bullhead populations.
“The channel catfish, the way I understand it, are going to go into two different bodies of
water, and those two bodies of water have a pretty bad bullhead population in them.
The hope is those channel catfish will grow up and prey on the bullheads and get rid of
some of the bullheads that are in the water. That’s kind of the goal behind the channel
catfish stuff, is that we will release these fish out into these different lakes, and they will
help control some of the bullhead problems that we’re seeing,” Hooley details.
The lake sturgeon raised at the hatchery will head to the Pembina River in northeastern
North Dakota and to tributaries of the Red River in western Minnesota. 1,000 sturgeon
will be stocked in the Pembina River, with lowhead dam modification on the horizon at
the junction between the tributary and the Red River into which it flows. This will open
up many contiguous miles of the Pembina to the highly-migratory sturgeon and the
stocking effort will mirror those going on in western Minnesota to restore the prehistoric fish to the border flow which has also benefitted from lowhead dam removal. The approximately 7,000 remaining reared sturgeon fingerlings will go to Minnesota, where they will supplement a burgeoning population which has begun naturally reproducing on the smaller tributaries which feed the Red River.
Walleyes will be stocked into various lakes around the region, but as the water utilized
by the hatchery comes from the Sheyenne River, which is a Class I infested flow with
zebra mussel populations well established, Hooley details that fish raised at the
hatchery will only go into waters where the aquatic nuisance species is already present.
In the meantime, hatchery staff are sizing up filtration and infrastructure changes to help prevent zebra mussels and their larval veligers (which can be as small as 39 microns or about one-one-thousandth of a inch in width) from getting into the ponds in the future, and expand their stocking operations back to what they were prior to the infestation on the Sheyenne.
“Right now, there’s a plan in place to get some rotary drum filters here at the facility.
When that is going to happen is still yet to be determined. But I think that’s the option
that we’re going to go with and what that will do is will filter out al the zebra adults and
the veligers. I think the filter size on those screens is 31 microns, so it’s extremely small
and it will get rid of a lot of stuff that’s unwanted,” Hooley explains.
In addition to being a key resource for fish stocking, the Valley City Fish Hatchery facility
has many outdoor recreation features open to the public, including a canoe and kayak
launch, picnic and grilling areas, access to shoreline fishing on the Sheyenne River, and
a stocked pond featuring pike, perch and stocked trout for young anglers to pursue.
More information on the facility, hours and use can be found at fws.gov/fish-
hatchery/valley-city.