Friends of the Upper Mississippi

Volunteer Don Schroeder tagging lake sturgeon at the Genoa National Fish Hatchery.

Partners working together to place passive integrated transponder tags into lake sturgeon headed for stocking to the Saginaw and Maumee River.

This year Genoa National Fish Hatchery staff collected eggs from the Wolf, Wisconsin, Rainy, St. Clair and St. Lawrence Rivers. Throughout the summer hatchery biologists, pathways students and Youth Conservation Corp. enrollees have their hands full feeding and caring for lake sturgeon. During the summer months of intensive culture, sturgeon are fed a diet of brine shrimp, bloodworms and krill at least three times daily. Near the end of the summer with ideal water temperatures lake sturgeon average 6-8 inches in length. Once reaching this length all sturgeon are coded wire tagged, which gives them a batch identification number and allows resource managers to assess future population growth and survival.
Hatchery staff rely heavily on partnerships between Friends Groups, school groups and other volunteers to assist with tagging the many strains of sturgeon before they leave station. The mission of the Friends Groups coincides with the Fish and Wildlife Service mission of conserving and protecting America’s Fish and Wildlife resources and their habitat for the continuing benefit of people. This year the Friends of Pools 8 and 9, as well as many other volunteers assisted with tagging, sample counting and checking for tag retention. Once these fish are tagged they are ready for transport to many locations from Northern Minnesota to Southern Tennessee and west to South Dakota and east as far as New York in support of continued restoration efforts.
Lake sturgeon stocking has just begun at the hatchery with the stocking of 7,500 lake sturgeon to the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. Lake sturgeon are considered endangered in the state of Tennessee, therefore TWRA prioritizes the restoration of Lake Sturgeon to the upper Tennessee River system. This restoration program began in 1998 and its goal is to restore populations of lake sturgeon in the upper Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. This is one of the many lake sturgeon restoration efforts continuing at Genoa National Fish Hatchery. This year with the help of many volunteers and partners the hatchery tagged nearly 70,000 sturgeon with coded wire tags and 4,000 with passive integrated transponder tags. Once the remaining fish are tagged our stocking season will wrap up with an early October stocking trip to the Saginaw, Maumee and St. Lawrence Rivers. By: Orey Eckes

Mudpuppy eggs laid on the under side of a piece of plywood. Credit: USFWS

A mudpuppy ready for use as a salamander mussel host. Credit: USFWS

    BY NATHAN ECKERT, GENOA NFH

The salamander mussel is the only North American freshwater mussel that uses something other than a fish as its larval host. The mudpuppy, a large salamander, is the known host of the salamander mussel, and they can be difficult to collect for use in mussel propagation. Through partnerships with the USGS we were able to acquire a population of adult mudpuppy to use as captive broodstock for propagation. In June 2016 we collected eggs from a successful spawn of our captive broodstock in one of the hatchery ponds. We then rolled the eggs in an egg jar as we do for walleye or trout until they hatched. From there the young continued to develop and were given a diet of brine shrimp until they were large enough to eat frozen bloodworms. Their diet has consisted solely of frozen bloodworms ever since, with the exception of a small batch of crayfish after pond harvest last fall.For the last year they have been held in a recirculating system in the mussel building at a constant temperature of 70° Fahrenheit. Over that time the animals have constantly gained about two grams of weight each per month. In fish culture we generally think of weight as the number of fish per pound, and using that metric our mudpuppies are currently at 10 per pound. The reason that we’ve raised this batch of mudpuppy is for them to serve as hosts for propagation of the salamander mussel at Genoa NFH. Salamander mussel glochidia attach to the gills and skin of the mudpuppy and transform from larvae to juveniles over the course of a few weeks in the spring. Last year we felt that the young mudpuppies were too small to serve as effective hosts, but this year they will be the focal point of our restoration efforts. It took a year to gather the broodstock and ultimately two additional years to grow the animals, but now we are ready to take our salamander mussel restoration efforts to the next level. Not all mussel restoration projects take this much planning and effort, but in unique cases it is good to know that we have the ability to solve an issue like access to the suitable host.

One of the great things about being located in a small community (where everyone knows your name), is that good people are always interested in the programs and activities of the local community, including our station. One of the big interests currently is the Great River Road Interpretive Center that is being constructed this winter at the Genoa hatchery. Even though the project seems to be taking a long time to complete, many people still mention that they are very anxious to see the completed project. Others, hearing that there will be a local history exhibit in the building, have also volunteered sources and other historical items of local interest to be included in the project. Historians and local authors have also reached out to share their wealth of knowledge in order to interpret the breadth of history that we are blessed with in the local area. One such historian, William Burke, stopped in to check on how the building was coming along. He also passed along a very interesting piece of history that we were unaware of. In 1910, a paddle wheel steamboat that was used as a touring/excursion boat caught fire and sank just out-side the hatchery exterior dikes.

    J.S steamboat before engulfed in flames

The steamboat J.S. was returning from La Crosse to its destination of Lansing Iowa on June 25th,1910 with over 1000 passengers. The ship departed at 6 p.m. from La Crosse, and was almost directly adjacent to Bad Axe Island when fire broke out. This location is just south of the hatchery exterior dikes. After some quick thinking by the captain and crew, the boat made shore on Bad Axe Island to offload its passengers. Most made it off by the gangplank; however about 2-300 passengers had to jump in the river from the upper deck as the first deck was totally engulfed in flames. The evacuation resulted in at least one tragic death, a young married woman that was pregnant with the couple’s first child. The only other casualty was a male passenger that purportedly was under arrest for drunkenness in the hold, and may have allegedly been responsible for starting the blaze by careless smoking. Once the passengers disembarked, the captain and a skeleton crew directed the burning ship back into the channel to get it away from the passengers on the island and it floated directly downstream and sunk burning to the waterline.

                                                         Aftermath of the devastating fire

Passengers spent the better part of the night marooned on Bad Axe Island, being rescued by local boats that wrapped up the rescue mission by 3:30 a.m. that morning. We are looking forward to telling this story as part of local history very soon when the Interpretive Center makes its grand opening. By Doug Aloisi

                        Salvage crew working on the sunken J.S steamboat