At the hatchery, the tales about fish have their true beginning

May 7—Andrew Scholten grabs a fishing net full of northern pike and hauls it over to a narrow gray tub of water. One by one he grabs the fish — each of which would make any angler smile — and flips it on its back.

With his thumb he gently rubs the fish's, uh, reproductive area looking for signs of eggs or semen. When he figures each one out, he announces the result.

"Male," he says, loud enough to be heard over the sounds of running water. As he does, Craig Soupir makes a hash mark on a mini clipboard.

"Male ... Male ... Spent female ... Male ... Female."

This inventory process is vital to the work of the Waterville Area Fisheries and hatchery. Keeping a close eye on the fish populations — particularly the kind of fish popular with anglers — is a critical cog in this machine.

If you love fishing in southern Minnesota — and you had some luck doing so — you probably owe a little bit of that love to the men and women hard at work here at the hatchery. For a good chunk of each year, they spend their days, counting fish, examining fish, raising and caring for fish, and finally stocking lakes with fish, all for the enjoyment of the Minnesota angler.

"It's all driven by anglers. Everything we do here is funded by anglers. The people buying licenses," Soupir says, gesturing to the tubs and the fish and people at work at the hatchery. "This is funded by them."

There are 15 fish hatcheries around the state of Minnesota. This particular one, situated between Elysian and Waterville in Le Sueur County, has been running continuously since 1953. It's grown over the years, and probably needs a bigger, updated facility. The staff here manages thousands of acres of land and stocks more than 200 lakes with walleye, muskie and northern pike.

March through November is spent directly stocking lakes and raising fish. During the winter months, they'll do maintenance work on state-owned land around the lakes they manage.

But the heart and soul of the operation is what takes place inside the facility.

Scholten reaches into the tub teeming with females and grabs a ripe one. With a firm squeeze on her midsection, thousands of eggs pour like syrup into a black dish. And it's more than you'd think. Seven, eight, nine gentle squeezes and the dish is filled with enough golden eggs to fill a small coffee cup.

Across the room, two more workers have a male on its back. Using a pair of wooden boards to hold it steady, they exert pressure on its midsection and extract the semen, deftly collecting it in a vial.

Then, the eggs and semen are brought together in a delicate process.

"So we have the eggs in the pan now and we're adding in the semen," Soupir says, explaining the process as he pours semen over the eggs like a frosting drizzle.

"Right now there's nothing happening. Until you add water, the micropyles on the egg that let the semen in won't open. That happens when you add the water, which is right about now."

Soupir slowly dumps a quart of fresh water into the semen-egg slurry and stirs it with a feather.

"So now, once the water hits those eggs," he says, "those little micropyles open up and that lets the semen come in and fertilize the egg."

Thirty seconds. That's how short the fertilization window is in this process. Once that water splashes in, the semen swimmers must proceed with haste; that micopyle doesn't suffer dawdlers.

Though that window of fertilization opportunity may be short, this hatchery process has a proven track record of success. They'll produce millions of fertilized eggs here, eggs that will live comfortably at the hatchery until it comes time to be transferred to a lake. Once transferred, the real challenge begins.

The vast majority will, sadly, not survive long after being introduced to their new homes. The death rate, Soupir says, can be as high as 90%.

But he says it's best to look at this scenario with a "glass half full" outlook: If they dump a million tiny dudes into a lake — a common number for a typical lake stocking — and 90% of them die, that's still 100,000 fish successfully added to the lake.

This hatchery produces 33% of all muskie in the state. For that variety of fish, the process is a bit different. Instead of pouring a million tiny fish into a lake, the muskies get a little more time to grow.

They'll start on dry food and be kept inside until they're 3-4 inches long. Then they head out to the hatchery's outdoor ponds where they stay until they get to about a foot long. After that, it's out to the lakes across the state.

So why is fish stocking even necessary? Isn't this Mother Nature's job?

Well, if left to her, there simply wouldn't be enough fish. She wouldn't be able to keep up. And Minnesotans love their sport fishing — especially for walleyes, northerns and muskies.

"For most situations, walleye can't reproduce enough or sometimes at all — and certainly not enough to sustain a sport fishery," Soupir says. "So stockings are extremely important to sustaining walleye fisheries in southern Minnesota. And the reason we do the pike stock is because that habitat has been degraded over the years. Pike require wetlands attached to lakes to swim up to during the spring in order to spawn. And we don't have a lot of those anymore because a lot of the wetlands have been drained."

Scholten says environmental concerns are important to him. Raised in a fishing family, he says he grew up with a keen interest in the outdoors and nature.

"I've always been interested in how we can conserve and protect what's handed down before us," he says. "Man tends to go overboard on how we treat the environment. We look at what it can do for us instead of what we can do for it. So I think one of our objectives is to protect that from outside influences."