It was all hands on deck at Little Campbell River Hatchery Thursday, with volunteers gathering for egg stripping, or egg taking, from female coho salmon.
Numbers of spawning salmon have been low at the hatchery, located at the Semiahmoo Fish and Game Club in South Surrey, this year, according to hatchery manager Roger McRurie.
Only a total of 669 coho were counted this year, compared to 3,791 last year and 2,110 the year before, and 335 chinoook have been counted so far, compared to last year's total of 993 and 706 the previous year.
"Numbers are low this year... coho and chinook are very low, we're not sure why," McRurie said, adding that this year is the anniversary of 2021's atmospheric river event that cause widespread flooding and washed out highways.
"This is their cycle for returning, so we're not sure if that had an effect on it."
He didn't want to speculate on potential reasons why, especially because numbers are higher at other hatcheries, including the Nicomekl River Hatchery, where president Nigel Easton said returns were good, although not quite as much as last year, but not alarmingly low.
"Our numbers are not as good as last year, but still definitely OK... we're still getting a few back now," Easton said.
Salmon are still being counted as well at the Little Campbell River facility, but on Thursday, the focus was on fertilizing a new generation of salmon to grow in the safety of the hatchery before they eventually, get released into the wild.
"What we're doing is, we're taking eggs from the females that we've got... this is their spawning year, so they're four years old," McRurie explained. "We remove the eggs from the females, weight them 鈥� we weigh 25 eggs, then weigh the total eggs and that gives us a weighted average."
He and other volunteers the take the milk from the males and sort it in cups, and then the female eggs are fertilized in the buckets they're collected in.
'From there we add water to the fertilized eggs... it hardens the eggs so no more milk can get into the eggs 鈥� it's a process that somehow, seals that hole the milk goes in," he said.
After they sit for a bit, the eggs are disinfected to prevent fungus or any other types of contaminants from affected them, before they are transferred to the hatchery's incubation room in heated trays.
Thousands of eggs are taken from females each year 鈥� one female can hold more than 2,000 eggs 鈥� and they're raised in the facility as juveniles before one day, being released back into the river to find their way to the ocean.
Some of the salmon eggs find their way into classrooms across the province, where students raise the eggs in classroom aquariums, and eventually, transport and release the fry into nearby streams, a program that is a project of Fisheries and Oceans Canada Habitat and Enhancement Branch.
Both wild and hatchery-raised fish return to the Little Campbell River every fall, but only a certain number of wild fish can be captured, as regulated by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO).
