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Friday, November 13, 2009
Tagging To Help Track Fish
By John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer
Ten years after U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials asked Albuquerque's BioPark to give minnow husbandry a try, there's an assembly line in Terina Perez's hatchery.
Perez and eight colleagues are tagging Rio Grande silvery minnows this week, picking the tiny fish up one by one and injecting each with a little daub of fluorescent green.
It's tedious work, but it will make it easier to keep track later of which of fish came from where.
In a grove of cottonwoods behind the botanical garden, the city-run Rio Grande Minnow Rearing and Breeding Facility is now capable of raising more than 70,000 of the endangered fish every year, according to Perez, the hatchery manager.
More than 20,000 of fish raised at the hatchery are destined for a stretch of the Rio Grande near Bosque del Apache. It is an area that frequently goes dry in the summer, where the fish population struggles as a result.
In the past, silvery minnows would simply wait out the dry spells in other parts of the river and return once the water started flowing again. But dams up and down the river now restrict the minnow's mobility, scientist say, making it far harder to return.
Every year, workers harvest some of the eggs the silvery minnows lay in the Rio Grande, bringing them into the safety of the hatchery where they are raised in tanks.
Tagging the fish makes it possible during later fish surveys to determine which fish were raised in hatcheries and which spawned in the wild, said Jason Remshardt, a fish biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
In the program's early years, over half the fish in the Albuquerque reach of the Rio Grande came from hatcheries, Remshardt said. But, in recent years, the natural population has been rebounding, he said.
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