Here is part of the 5th grade St. James class with their tour guide at the Nimbus Fish Hatchery on the American River. We have been learning about the stages of salmon at school, so we decided to take a field trip to the fish hatchery. We saw live fish and many stages of the fish. The fish hatchery catches adult migrating male and female fish. They take the eggs and sperm from the fish. They hatch the eggs in water from the American River, so that when the time for spawning comes they will return back home. The workers at the fish hatchery raise fish from the eggs to a older stage where the could migrate up the stream and into the ocean.
Here you see two of our friends, Kimmy (on the left) and Catherine (on the right) playing one fo the fish hatchery games. It's a chance game. They will spin the wheel and find their fishy future. See the tiny red stripe? That's their chance of surviving and making it back to spawn. The rest of the colors are some form of death for the fish. Oh no! Catherine's fishy died!
Oh no! Nimbus is flooding! Not! This is called a fish ladder. This is how the fish get to Nimbus. They jump up each step like a ladder, and if they get tired they can stop and rest in between the steps, which are several feet deep. The ladder leads up to Nimbus where the workers will catch the fish and help them to spawn.
After Steelhead fish have been spawned in Nimbus, (steelhead spawn more than once, unlike salmon who die after spawning once) the workers at Nimbus put the fish back in the river. Down tubes like waterslides, the fish flow back down to the river. They have more fishy waterslides that lead to different places, but this one leads to the river, see it says "RIVER".
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The Stages of a Fish!