Largemouth bass broodstock are placed in spawning pond at Genoa National Fish Hatchery - USFWS photo

Mid-March marks the beginning of the season of “romance” for captive fish stocks at Genoa National Fish Hatchery.  The hatchery, located in southwestern Wisconsin on the banks of the Upper Mississippi River, is home to nearly 1,000 adult captive reared sport fish of six species. These fish are maintained at Genoa NFH as a “captive brood stock” whose sole purpose is to produce millions of progeny in order to fulfill federal, tribal, and state cooperator fishery management goals.

Annually the hatchery produces hundreds of thousands of largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, bluegills, yellow perch and other species to meet fishery requests on National Wildlife Refuges, military installations, tribal governments, and cooperative management projects with states and universities.  The process of filling these requests starts every March when station biologists and technicians harvest, sort to species, and stock hundreds of brood fish into rearing ponds on the hatchery.  Once water temperatures warm to a specific species requirement the fish will begin to reproduce on their own without any further involvement by man.

Depending on the species or the life stage required for a particular management plan the ponds are harvested from early July until late autumn.  Throughout this “grow out” period for the young fish the adults are either removed from the ponds by netting or allowed to cohabitate with the newly hatched generation.  Once the adults are removed from the rearing ponds they are maintained in a communal wintering pond until the next spring when the process begins all over again. 

Throughout the year the brood fish are fed a diet of hatchery produced forage fish, or in the case of some of the smaller species, glean insects and other invertebrates from the ponds. 

For more information on this or other programs carried out at Genoa National Fish Hatchery please contact the station at 608-689-2605 or e-mail roger_gordon@fws.gov