When the Waldoboro Shad Hatchery is up and running, the atmosphere in the growout room resembles a hospital intensive care unit. There’s a hum, bubble, click and whir as pipes, tubes and electrical wires that crisscross the room deliver power, nutrients, water and oxygen and remove waste from six 600-gallon tanks. But unlike a modern ICU, there are no computers to monitor all this activity, no central station where one person can keep an eye on how all the tanks are operating and the fish are faring.
Instead, Carolyn Chapman, head nurse in this ward, makes her rounds of the six tanks every few minutes, checking to see that all are functioning as they should be to nurture the thousands of shad fry that hatch from fertilized eggs placed in the tank in small “upwellers.” Once the eggs hatch, the fish fry float out into the tanks, and are nursed for about five days, until they’ve grown to approximately one-half-inch, large enough to be released in one of several Maine rivers. They remain in the river, feeding on insects and crustaceans until they reach the juvenile stage, about 3 to 5 inches. Then they swim downriver to the sea, a perilous journey past a gauntlet of ravenous sea birds, striped bass and eels.
Carolyn, her husband Sam and their son Andrew work at the hatchery seven days a week, 12 and more hours a day from March through September. The two times in 12 years that they have taken time off, they wished they hadn’t. Once, a valve malfunctioned, slowing the outflow of water from the tanks, and they returned to discover thousands of dead fry on the floor. While they were away the other time, a water feed line kinked and they lost half of the shad in the tanks.
Sam studied botany at University of Maine at Orono and worked at the Darling Marine Center while completing his degree. At the same time, Carolyn, who had no scientific background, began to work as assistant for the center’s director, Dr. David Dean. “I learned everything on the job,” she says, “raising marine worms, shellfish and lobsters.” While at Darling, Sam became involved in efforts by the town of Waldoboro and Department of Marine Resources to restore alewives and smelts in the Medomak River.
They started the hatchery, one of 10 on the East Coast, in their garage in 1991, because they realized the American shad stock had diminished significantly and was ripe for restoration. At first, they ran the hatchery as an experimental project on a volunteer basis, but when Darling downsized and Sam lost his job, he told the DMR he had to receive payment or abandon the hatchery. A cooperative program developed, with funding from the DMR, the Town of Waldoboro and the Time & Tide Mid-Coast Fisheries Development Project. Now, the hatchery is funded by the DMR and Kennebec Hydro Dam Group, which contributes in lieu of constructing fishways at remaining dams on the Kennebec River. The Chapmans contract to deliver a given number of fish for stocking each year.
In 2000, the Chapmans moved to their present facility in Waldoboro, site of a former wastewater treatment plant for Medomak Canning Co. Here, they have three ponds and three separate buildings: two with spawning tanks. growout tanks in the third. Andrew joined them full time after graduating from Unity College with a degree in Environmental Science with a double major in Ecology and Fisheries.
Last year the Chapmans supplied the DMR with almost 9.7 million shad fry for stocking Maine rivers, more than three times the number of fish they had raised in any previous season. The bulk of the fry went into the Kennebec River, the rest into the Sebasticook, Androscoggin and Medomak Rivers. Sam says they could match the numbers this year, but cuts in DMR funding have restricted them to a contract of seven million fish.
Originally, he adds, the agreement with DMR and KHCG stipulated that once the Chapmans had proved their system works, they would be given additional funding for hatchery improvements and expansion. But, again, scarcity of DMR funds have put those plans on hold. “We’re stuck with a pilot facility and full commercial production,” he says.
The Chapmans designed, built and maintain all of the hatchery’s equipment, which reflects the ingenuity always evident in aquaculture operations with a small budget. They scrounged materials: oyster spat bags to collect eggs from the spawning tank, ordinary five-gallon buckets for upwellers, green room dividers on the walls to mute the roar of industrial exhaust fans, pipe hangers and other equipment donated by Darling Marine Center.
Andrew came up with a novel solution for a problem that had plagued them and other shad hatcheries, that when the temperature in the nursery spiked in summer above a certain level and water temperature rose, they invariably lost a large number of fry. “The fish were getting little bubbles inside and died,” says Sam. “It took us several years to figure out the high temperature was causing the problem.” Andrew designed an economical arrangement of radiators and household box fans to capture cool temperatures of their well water and send it into the nursery, and they haven’t had the problem since.
The Waldoboro Shad Hatchery is featured in a chapter of John McPhee’s fascinating book, “The Founding Fish,” (2002) which celebrates the importance of American shad (Alosa sapidissima) in America from prior to colonial times to the present. Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission records say shad are present in almost every major river along the Atlantic Coast. In 1896, commercial Atlantic Coast landings of American shad exceeded 22,000 metric tons, but that since 1993, landings have exceeded 900 metric tons only once, in 1998. Reduction of the shad population is attributed to the presence of river dams which prevent the fish from reaching their spawning grounds, overfishing and river pollution.
McPhee sat for hours with Sam, watching shad spawn in tanks at the hatchery. These adults, anadromous fish closely related to alewives, return to their rivers of origin to spawn after living in the ocean five or more years. The ones the hatchery uses are collected from fish traps at dams in either the Merrimack River in Massachusetts or the Saco River in Maine and transported in truck tanks to the hatchery by the DMR transport crew, which Sam describes as “most likely the best on the East Coast.”
Unlike many hatcheries, where eggs and milt are forcibly expelled from the mature adults which then die, the Waldoboro fish spawn naturally at night as they circle in the tanks, filling the water with eggs and milt. In the morning, Sam collects and cleans the fertilized eggs, sorts them according to size and quality and delivers them to Carolyn and Andrew. “On our best day, we’ll have six gallons of eggs, which adds up to over a million,” he says. The mature adults may continue to spawn as long as two and one-half months. Then the approximately 58 percent who survive the frenzy of spawning are released in the Medomak River.
After the newly hatched fry plop into the water in the nursery tank, they look around for food. Since they have no qualms about eating each other, Carolyn is ready with an automatic feeding system that every 15 minutes delivers a mixture of reconstituted freeze dried brine shrimp grown at the hatchery. When the fry are ready to be transported to one of Maine’s rivers, the Chapmans reduce the water level in the tank and add some tetracycline, which adheres to calcium in the fish bones. Under ultraviolet light and a microscope, it can be detected as a small yellow mark in the fish’s otolith, a small bone in its head. Using this marking, the DMR has determined that each year since stocking began, the percentage of hatchery fish heading out to sea in the Kennebec River has steadily increased.
Sam is confident the hatchery’s shad have a strong future in Maine and possibly other New England rivers. Because shad are able to adapt to diverse climactic conditions — they thrive from Florida to Canada — he believes shad restoration has a much greater potential than salmon restoration. Shad are highly prized for their flavor (sapidissima means savory) and delicious roe.
He relates that a study conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1993 considered all services utilized by fishermen (bait, gear, gas, etc.) and concluded that each shad landed from a boat cost a fisherman $45, and caught from shore, $22.50. As river dams are removed, pollution cleared up, stocking increased and more fish return to Maine rivers, “It could add up to millions of dollars for the Maine economy,” he says.
The Chapmans look forward to the time they will have funds to expand to 12 tanks, so they can leave some tanks fallow instead of having a tight schedule of fertilization of eggs, transfer to tanks, transfer of fish out of tanks to the DMR team, cleaning tanks and starting again. “The way it is now, if you have one day’s delay, you have a big problem,” Sam says. But, he adds, “I think we do very well with what we have.”