The Salmon Hatchery

Ask Cora where she wants to go at any given moment and you'll get one of three answers: the glacier, Hot Bites (an outdoor restaurant with good milkshakes and fries), or the salmon hatchery.  The Macaulay Salmon Hatchery has become a favorite destination for us.  Not only to check on the status of the spawning salmon but for the cool touch tanks with aquatic creatures the girls thoroughly enjoy.

Now, see if you are as impressed with my newly minted knowledge of the salmon life cycle as I am.

Here is the "ladder."  The salmon swim up the Gastineau Channel and encounter the fresh water of the hatchery.  They make their way up the ladder, against the current, jumping at times from stage to stage.  Once they reach the top, the eggs and milt are extracted and the fertilization begins.  It's very romantic ;)

Once the baby salmon have hatched, the particular "smell" of this fresh water is imprinted on them before they are released into the ocean, just as the smell of a certain stream or river would imprinted on a salmon born in the wild.  That smell is what the adult salmon search for when they are ready to spawn in 4-5 years time and when they will make their back to this hatchery.  The hatchery releases 120 million salmon each spring but only 10% actually make it back.

Even at just 10%, this is an insane number of salmon to see in one spot on one random day.

After the eggs and milt are extracted from the salmon, they die, just as they do in the wild.  The salmon are sent away to be turned into fertilizer and other products. (Did you know that you don't actually want to eat spawning salmon...I mean it makes sense but I guess I never thought about it.  Spawning salmon are all but dead by the time they make it upstream.  The minute they hit freshwater, their bodies shut down every system and function non-essential to reproduction.  By the time they lay their eggs, they are sometimes even beginning to decompose).

Cora loves to admire the beautiful salmon eggs.

The hatchery was careful to explain that this is not a fish farm, which is illegal in Alaska.  The hatchery is there to support the survival of wild salmon.  It protects the eggs, releases the baby salmon into the ocean and is there to receive the spawning salmon at the end of their life cycle.

Enough about salmon.  The hatchery also has some great aquariums and touch tanks for educational purposes.  The girls love them.  Addy touches everything except the crabs.  Cora won't touch anything but loves to stand there and watch.