| OCR Text |
Show j , -- V- : 'ft H . I j . .. v -i .. . . - I ''' '' j LESA EYRE MICHELLE MYERS The American Legion Auxiliary Aux-iliary have chosen two girls to represent Minersville at Girls State, to be held in Cedar City for the week of June 6 to 12th. The girls are Lesa Eyre, daughter of Jerry and Joanne Eyre, and Michelle Myers, daughter of Vendon and LaRayne Myers. A. K. BOWLER, FEEDING FISH AT BEAVER HATCHERY ery. Kay, Louis Limb (who has been employed there for over 25 years) and the rest of the staff welcome school groups, scouts, and just plain inquisitive folks (like me), from 8 to 5 any working day. It will be well worth your while. stocked by fall, it takes fish about a year to grow to catchable size. In the Fall we sort them and put them in three different dif-ferent groups. They are just like children all the same age, but different sizes. We winter over around 200 thousand. Our water temperature temp-erature stays about 50 naturally. Cold water won't hurt them unless it freezes solid, but when water temperatures get up around 80 to 90 we loose a lot of fish. We have this problem with Minersville Reservoir late in the year. Over -crowding is another problem. Fish won't grow well till they are thinned out and have room to expand. The environment determines the size of the fish to a large extent. Trout can grow to a large size. They are many on record one 38 pounder was caught in the Logan River a while ago. The reknowned Steelhead, so popular in Oregon, etc., is really a Rainbow. We do have set quotas for each lake, stream, etc., which are pre -set. We often hear people ask why we don't plant more fish in this lake, or that stream this is the reason. For instance, Kent's Lake quota is 4,000 catchables (of course we plant lots of fingerlings) but because of the dam break which hasn't been repaired, we can only plant half that number. The balance can be redistributed over the state. Fish are susceptible to many diseases just as humans are. They can have hepatitis, heart and kidney diseases, ulcers, deformities, deform-ities, and even get sunburned. sun-burned. The blood count in cold water fish is similar to that of humans. Studies being carried out on fish are helping to find causes and cures for many of man's diseases. Before we can plant fish in any streams or lakes, they must be certified to be free of disease. We have many rules and regulations to follow here at the hatchery. We monitor the water and now must take samples every 2 hours once each month and send them to be analyzed. The EPA will make up its standards from these reports. We are here to enforce water quality in accordance with our state laws. We don't have much trouble in this area. But, we do have to take care of our waters. (Did you know that the fish industry is bigger than the beef industry?) Ruining the oceans, seas and lakes is detrimental to us and future generations. We do treat ponds, reservoirs, for trash fish. This usually entails using rotone, which absorbs the oxygen in the water, suffocating suf-focating all the fish. Perhaps one day this method may not be allowed, and we'll have to find some other way to deal with the problem. We spent around $120 thousand dollars treating and restocking restock-ing Minersville Lake a few years ago." Why not plan to spend a pleasant and informative afternoon touring the hatch - |
