| Re: White Seabass Release and Recapture Facts (Please turn in heads!)
I took a tour of the hatchery on April 22nd with a group of guys from SCsurffishing. Very cool stuff here is some info about the WSB and the hatchery.
First of all they have four big tanks with 50 brute stock (breeders) with 25 males and 25 females in each tank. Average size of these fish is 35#s with many 40#+ fish in there. They can manipulate which one of the tanks they want to spawn by changing water temps and lighting. Once they spawn the females shoot thier eggs out and the males milt. The eggs that get fertilized float to the top of the tank. They have a skimmer that sucks the eggs off and into a very fine mesh net.
Once they get the eggs they move them to a tank to spur thier growth. During the first month the try to get them off of live food brine shrimp to thier dry pellet food. In the first month from egg tank to one month old tank the survival rate in the controlled tanks is only 1-1/2%. Pretty crazy to think that only 1 or 2 fish per hundred eggs survive. How much lower is that in the wild. At about one month old they are about 1/2" long. After the first month the survival rate is about 90%. In the first 2 months they are growing rapidly. At two months they are about 2" long. When we were at the hatchery we were all surprised to see the difference a month makes with these guys.
They wait till they get about 4-5" in size, at about 4 months, to move them to the outside tanks called runways. They have 8 total runways that hold 8,000 to 10,000 each. Once these fish get to the 6-8" range (about 6 months) is when they tag them and move them to grow out pens that are in the harbors from Mission Bay to Catalina to Oxnard. They hand tag each fish with "stones" that are implanted in the fishes head. They drug the fish sort of and they slow down to do this.
The transport the fish to the growout pens which are netted inclosures in the harbors like the one in Newport Harbor and many others up and down the coast. They have a couple trucks that are refridgerated to transport the fish. This helps the fishes metabolism slow down for the trip. To get the fish to the two grow out pens at Catalina they have a boat that donates its time to take them out there.
They try to get the fish to grow to about 10-12" long before they let them out of the grow out pens. Which is about 1 full year from the beginning stage. If they transport the fish and they fill up that particular grow out pen the extra fish they will release the 6-8" fish out into the harbor.
A legal size WSB which is 28" is about 4 years old. Also a 28" fish is big enough to breed in the wild.
They can track the fish by the stones that are inserted into the heads. So if you catch one and keep one take it to any sportfishing landing. They will freeze the head and keep till they can pick them up. They can tell which grow out pen the fish came from, which breeding tank it came from and when it was released. They have tracked fish that were released from Newport and were caught yrs later at all the islands from the channel islands down to mexico. About 15% of all heads they recieve from fisherman, commercial fisherman, and fish markets have been released by the hatchery. They figure it could reach about 20-30% by the rate they are going. They have it down pretty good. They have released well over 1,000,000 WSB into the wild.
Pretty cool stuff.
They are also working on sheephead. Right now they have 5 groups of fish one male with 4 females. They have had them for 5 yrs and have not had any offspring live longer than 14 days. They said they will probably work for a couple more yrs on this before scrapping the project.
In mission bay they have a yellowtail program where they have a tank the size of an ice skating rink with over 100 25# Yellowtail. That would be very cool to see.
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