"Mayhem" said:
Thats an amazing difference! Will, do you have any additional info on how the egg take has been going that you can share? Just wondering if they are having more success finding ripe fish this year.

Last night should have wrapped up the egg take for 2012. They have consistently been catching 20-30 fish per night (mostly males) and before last night they had captured 17 ripe females. The change in capture tactics that saved last year has made all the difference.

Considering that all production from 2011 was from just a few fish, the program looks to be in pretty good shape this year.

Correction

I assumed and we all know what happens when you ASSume.

The extender they're using isn't what would normally be considered an "extender" as would be used when processing sperm for freezing. This extender increases the pH causing the sperm to be inactive. The eggs and milt are then thoroughly mixed without fertilization. Then hatchery water is added to the now mixed eggs and milt which lowers the pH and the sperm becomes active again and fertilization occurs.

Overall fertilization rate with all females and no extender was 26%, overall fertilization with extender was 76%.

1.145 million eggs were collected this spring.

"Kingfisher" said:

Even 50 % of that is a lot of freaking fingerlings . I will guess they cant come close to raising that many. I will also hope they stock the excess fry and spread them around. Can they send some up to other hatcheries? Mike

Yes, that is a lot of eggs but that was the previous goal with Thornapple and resulted in 25-30 thousand fall fingerlings when everything went well. These fish did much better indoors than the Thornapple fish and if the hatchery is as successful as 2011 there will likely be fry and/or spring fingerling distribution. No, they will not be sent to other hatcheries there isn't another facility able to accept them. Some areas could be pretty successful with fry planting if it gets to that point. It would be better to see them grown to at least 4-5" before stocking. This talk is really counting our eggs before they're hatched (pun intended) as there are so many things that can go wrong with the little critters.

"Mayhem" said:
Don't we have some sort of agreement to send Wisconson fish this year? If so what, if anything, are we getting in return?

Yes, Wisconsin will get up to 3000 4-5" spring fingerlings. I believe Wisconsin sent people over to work Anchor Bay nets for a couple weeks like they did last year. If that wasn't the case there will be some type of trade off eventually.