Gulf Coast facility helps keep saltwater fishing afloat in Alabama
Red drum swim in a tank in the brood stock room at Claude Peteet Mariculture Center in Gulf Shores. (Mike Kittrell/Alabama NewsCenter)
Marie Head works long hours monitoring conditions and tending to the fish at the Claude Peteet Mariculture Center in Gulf Shores. She shares on-call duties on weekends and holidays for a facility that requires constant attention. Being a biologist’s aide isn’t a high-paying job, either.
And there’s nowhere else she’d rather be than the hatchery that grows saltwater fish for research and stock enhancement.
Claude Peteet Mariculture Center helps keep fishing afloat in Alabama from Alabama NewsCenter on Vimeo.
Marie Head, a biologist aide, feeds red drum in the pond production room at Claude Peteet Mariculture Center in Gulf Shores. (Mike Kittrell/Alabama NewsCenter)
“I love it,” Head said with a smile. “We watch them hatch out under a microscope. We feed them and grow them so that they can be released and fishermen can fish. You get to see life right here in this building.”
Despite Alabama’s small coastline, recreational saltwater fishing is a $900-million-plus business for the state. The Alabama Department of Conservation Division of Marine Resources oversees both recreation and commercial fishing in saltwater. Its hatchery spearheads efforts to make sure anglers have plenty of fish to pursue down at the Gulf.
“We’re two-fold,” said Josh Neese, hatchery manager. “We do research and raise fish in mass numbers to release at one inch long.”
Completed in January 2015, the hatchery, tucked away behind the Gulf Shores Airport, includes a brood stock room, a fry room, grow-out tanks, an algae room where food for the larval and fish fry is grown, a pond production area and 35 one-fifth-acre ponds, said Chris Blankenship, director of Marine Resources. Raw water lines connect the facility to the Intracoastal Waterway Canal, where it draws its brackish water, and the Gulf of Mexico at Gulf State Park Pier, where it gets its pure salt water.
Two 10,000-gallon tanks hold the saltwater used in the facility and 23 individual pumps with varying types of filtration systems hum constantly in a long mechanical room to keep water circulating. Hatchery employees must constantly monitor water conditions and temperatures and the health of the fish there.
“It’s seven days a week,” Neese said. “We monitor the water quality daily. We’re always monitoring the fish because it can turn ugly quickly. It’s a lot easier to kill fish than to grow them. You’re dealing with parasites, bacteria, viruses. At certain points when they are fry, they’ll cannibalize.”
The hatchery focuses on three important game species: red drum, also known as redfish, Southern flounder and Florida pompano. Red drum research is being done in partnership with the University of South Alabama while a pompano study is in cooperation with Auburn University.
For many years, red drum were considered virtually trash fish. Then, in the 1980s, Louisiana Chef Paul Prudhomme introduced the world to his blackened redfish and the effect on the red drum population was devastating.
Since then, a ban on commercial fishing for redfish, carefully restricted sport fishing and restoration efforts like the hatchery’s have brought red drum numbers back. Hatchery officials hope research will help fisheries officials better manage the species.
In the pond production area, 23 wild-caught red drum about 15 inches long swim back and forth in a long tank. They have been outfitted with radio transmitters. Next to them, 50 hatchery-raised fish are similarly outfitted. Each of the transmitters emits a sound that individually identifies each fish.
The University of South Alabama has positioned hydrophones at the Fowl and Dog rivers and in south Mobile Bay and north Mobile Bay. The fish will be released in various locations and the transmitters and hydrophones will track their locations, Neese said.
“We want to compare the movements of hatchery fish to wild caught fish,” Neese said.
The study already has 60-70 tagged fish in the wild. Neese notes that one tagged fish was caught in the Dog River and weighed in at the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo at Dauphin Island. About three weeks later, the fish returned to almost the exact location where it was caught.
Red drum swim in a tank in the pond production room at Claude Peteet Mariculture Center. (Mike Kittrell/Alabama NewsCenter)
The hatchery fish come from brood stock that were caught in the wild and are kept in 3,500-gallon tanks in the brood stock room. Inside three of the tanks, big, mature redfish, some up to 30 pounds, swim sullenly around.
Red drum normally spawn only in the fall. But the hatchery varies the water temperature and lighting to fool the brood stock into more frequent spawning. The tanks cycle through 12 months of seasonal temperature and light variations in just four months. With three different tanks of red drum on staged sequences, the hatchery has spawning red drum three out every four months, Neese said.
Two of the six tanks contain Florida pompano, the speedy silver surfers of the sportfish world. Auburn is experimenting with them to see if a dietary supplement called taurine will make their offspring more successful.
The pompano are kept at 22 degrees Celsius for six weeks, then their water temperature is raised one degree per day until it reaches 28 degrees Celsius. The temperature is left at 28 degrees Celsius for eight weeks while they spawn.
Flounder have been more problematic. The tank holds 12 females and three males and the hatchery needs more males.
Hatchery workers collect the fertilized eggs from the tanks and take them to a larval room. There can be as few as 10,000 fertilized eggs and as many as 1 million. The Red drum young hatch out 24 hours after fertilization and have a yoke sack that they live off of for three days. After that, they must be fed plankton grown in the algae room.
The fish stay in the larval room until 12 days after they hatch and are then moved to the fry room. They are one millimeter long when they hatch and eight millimeters long when they leave the larval room. The target in the fry room is to grow the fish out to 25 millimeters, or one inch, by 35 days after hatching. Improved nutrition and maintaining optimal temperatures have cut that time to as little as 25 days after hatching, Neese said.
John Neese, hatchery manager, holds a red drum in the pond production room at Claude Peteet Mariculture Center on Wednesday, May 25, 2016, in Gulf Shores, Ala. (Mike Kittrell/Alabama NewsCenter)
Once they reach that size, they are either released or put into a holding facility, like one of the ponds behind the hatchery building, to be retained for research. Pumps also supply salt water to the ponds, which are dug into the ground and have polyurethane liners. The ponds have their own set of challenges.
“We’ve had to get alligators out of here,” Neese said with a laugh.
While they leave the alligators to a professional alligator hunter, the hatchery workers enjoy the challenges their work presents.
“It was what I went to school for,” said Head, who is working on a master’s degree in marine biology after getting her bachelor’s degree in the field from the University of West Florida “I knew this was the future of seafood.”
