Update from the Tank

I'll bet everyone is wondering, whatever happened to those fish eggs we fertilized? Well, we're happy to report that we have nine healthy salmon fry swimming around in our fish tank. Well, mostly healthy. One-Eyed Jack has a messed up eye, and Squiggles doesn't swim so straight. 

So we wanted to catch you up on the stages of the salmon cycle so you'd know where our fish are.

Hatching in the spring the alevins emerge. Our fish hatched long-before spring because we sped up the process by heating the tank.  Our tank was set to 12 degrees Celsius.  This cut the time until hatching drastically. When our fish hatched, we had about 10 alevins.

They had a yolk sac attached to their bellies which they fed off of for the next few months. In the wild, they'll stay close to the redd for that time. The redd is the gravel nest where the eggs were deposited by the spawning females. Our fish have consumed their yolk sacs now and are considered fry. In the tank they just swim in circles. But in the wild, the fry from the chum would now leave the redd and head for the sea. Sockeye Salmon would be heading for the lake where they would spend one to two years before heading to the sea.