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Show Whirling Disease Found At Mammoth Creek Fish Hatchery In Hatch SALT LAKE CITY - The parasite that causes whirling disease dis-ease has been confirmed in trout taken from the Mammoth Creek State Fish Hatchery. The hatchery hatch-ery is closed and will remain so until the disease is removed, officials with the Division of Wildlife Resources have announced. The hatchery is in Garfield County, just south of Hatch. Fish in DWR hatcheries are tested for various diseases one or two times a year. Spores resembling Myxobolus cere-bralis, cere-bralis, the parasite that causes whirling disease, were detected in fish from the Mammoth Creek Hatchery during a yearly sampling of the hatchery at the end of May, said Randy Radant, Aquatics Section chief for the Division of Wildlife Resources. As soon as DWR officials learned that trout in the hatchery might have the disease, they stopped stocking fish from the hatchery and conducted more tests to confirm the initial findings. find-ings. Those additional tests have confirmed that trout in the hatchery are infected with the whirling disease parasite. Fish that have the disease are safe for people to eat, however. Radant says it's unclear how whirling disease entered the hatchery. An emergency response team has also been formed to develop an action plan to deal with the situation. Radant says most of the fish from Mammoth Creek are stocked in southern Utah. "We'll shift some of the fish from other hatcheries to waters that would normally have been stocked by Mammoth Creek," he said. "This is a good year to do that because drought conditions have reduced the number of waters we can stock, so we have fish that we can stock in these waters." A renovated state fish hatchery hatch-ery at Fountain Green, in central Utah, will also be fully operational opera-tional next year and will help replace some of the fish that Mammoth Creek would have slocked The Garfield County News will' carry an in-depth article about the hatchery's closure in next week's issue. I |
