Castalia State Fish Hatchery Celebrates $7 Million Renovation

CASTALIA, OH – The Castalia State Fish Hatch­ery was ded­i­cated today after under­go­ing a major ren­o­va­tion to make the hatch­ery a state-of-the-art steel­head pro­duc­tion facil­ity, accord­ing to the Ohio Depart­ment of Nat­ural Resources’ (ODNR) Divi­sion of Wildlife.

The ded­i­ca­tion was held at the facil­ity located in Castalia, Erie County, where the Divi­sion of Wildlife annu­ally raises 400,000 steel­head trout. In addi­tion to the steel­head, which are stocked into five Lake Erie trib­u­taries, the facil­ity also raises many of the catch­able rain­bow trout stocked each spring through­out Ohio.

The Castalia State Fish Hatch­ery is located on a 90-acre site with one of the area’s famous blue-hole aquifers, which pro­vides the hatch­ery with 2,500 gal­lons per minute of the cold water nec­es­sary for steel­head trout pro­duc­tion. The new 12,000-square-foot hatch­ery is designed to incu­bate up to 1 mil­lion steel­head eggs and feed up to 500,000 fin­ger­lings that will allow the Divi­sion of Wildlife to raise 400,000 steel­head. In addi­tion, the 900-foot blue-hole race­way is now enclosed to pro­tect fish from preda­tors and sun­light. A state of the art mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem will ensure opti­mal water con­di­tions for fish growth, and an alarm sys­tem with emer­gency gen­er­a­tors will pre­vent fish loss from power outages.

Each year, Ohio’s 1.2 mil­lion anglers con­tribute more than $1.8 bil­lion to the econ­omy. The pur­suit of fish­ing in Ohio annu­ally gen­er­ates $1.1 bil­lion in retail sales, $90 mil­lion in state and local tax rev­enue and sup­ports 17,000 Ohio jobs.

Projects like the Castalia ren­o­va­tion are made pos­si­ble by the $14 mil­lion anglers con­tribute annu­ally through the pur­chase of fish­ing licenses and funds pro­vided by the fed­eral Sport Fish Restora­tion Pro­gram. This user-pays pro­gram col­lects excise taxes on the sale of fish­ing equip­ment and marine fuel to fund fish­ing and boat­ing activ­i­ties through­out the United States. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Ser­vice admin­is­ters the pro­gram and returns money to each state based on the num­ber of fish­ing licenses sold and the amount of land and water area.

Castalia is one of six state fish hatch­eries oper­ated by the Divi­sion of Wildlife, and all six of the hatch­eries com­bined will stock 23 mil­lion fish in 2012. Besides the steel­head and rain­bow trout, other species of fish stocked in Ohio water­ways include wall­eye, saug­eye, brown trout, muskel­lunge, cat­fish and hybrid-striped bass.

For more infor­ma­tion about the Divi­sion of Wildlife’s fish hatch­eries, visit their web­site at wildohio.com.

ODNR ensures a bal­ance between wise use and pro­tec­tion of our nat­ural resources for the ben­e­fit of all. Visit the ODNR web­site at ohiodnr.com.

Posted by Staff Reports on Apr 18 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.