PEOPLE & 



PLACES 



The 

 L 



On the Refuse Road: 



National Hsh Hatchery 



By Pant Smith 



-t's a good bet 

 that the next striped 

 bass you catch could 

 trace its origins to the 

 Edenton National Fish 

 Hatchery. To the 

 delight of recreational 

 anglers, nearly a 

 million stripers cultured 

 each year at the 

 hatchery are destined 

 for streams in North 

 Carolina. South 

 Carolina and Virginia. 



"Sometimes 

 Mother Nature needs a 

 little help." hatchery 

 manager Arnold Rakes 

 says of the historic 

 facility's fisheries 

 restoration and 

 recovery mission. 



The Edenton 

 National Hatchery is 

 one of 1 2 North 

 Carolina sites under the 

 aegis of the U.S. Fish& 

 Wildlife Service's 

 (F&WS) National 

 Wildlife Refuge and 

 National Fish Hatchery System. Interestingly, 

 the hatchery predates the century-old refuge 

 system. 



The country was still young when once- 

 abundant fisheries began to show signs of 

 decline, Rakes recounts. Farming, droughts and 

 floods, industrialization, population growth and 

 commerical and recreational overfishing 

 contributed to degraded fisheries resources 

 across the nation. 



Congress reacted in 1871 by creating the 



For more than a century, the Edenton National Fish Hatchery lias been growing "crops " 

 of shad and striped bass to stock streams in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. 



site until 1958. The 

 hatchery resumed 

 production from a 

 new location a half- 

 mile away in 1960. 



More than a 

 century since the 

 hatchery's founding, 

 the same fisheries — 

 once the dietary 

 mainstay of many 

 North Carolinians — 

 are still in trouble. 



Today, the 

 Edenton hatchery 

 efforts focus on 

 restoration of striped 

 bass and shad, as 

 well as the recovery 

 of the Cape Fear 

 shiner, an endangered 

 minnow. 



MISSION AND 

 METHODS 



The hatchery's 

 restoration and 

 recovery mission is 

 unchanged, but 

 hatchery methods 



Commission on Fish and Fisheries and 

 appropriating funds for the first national 

 hatchery — a forerunner of today's F&WS 

 Fisheries Program. 



The Edenton National Fish Hatchery was 

 established on Pembroke Creek in 1 898 to 

 address declining populations of warmwater fish 

 species, including the American shad, striped 

 bass and river herring — anadromous fish that 

 move from ocean waters into freshwater 

 spawning grounds. It continued to operate at that 



have advanced exponentially over the years, 

 says Rakes, a former fish culture trainer for the 

 Fisheries Program. 



Though he's been manager here for less 

 than a year. Rakes is no newcomer to the 

 Edenton complex. From 1980 to 1984, he served 

 as an assistant to Elliott Atstupenas, long-time 

 hatchery manager who retired in 2001 . 



Fish rearing was far from an exact science 

 in the earliest hatchery days. Edenton hatchery 

 workers followed fishers working pound nets 



20 EARLY SUMMER 2003 



