During January and February 2018, Jordan River National Fish Hatchery staff, in cooperation with Green Bay Fish and Wildlife Conservation office, and with support of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission conducted spawning operations on wild populations of bloater on Lake Michigan. Fertilized eggs from those operations were shipped to Jordan River National Fish Hatchery and the U.S. Geological Survey Tunison Laboratory of Aquatic Research. The eggs destined for the hatchery became the founding stock of the national fish hatchery systems efforts to create a captive breeding population for this deep-water cisco. Partners involved in this project have been active in bloater restoration efforts on the Great Lakes since 2012 when the first successful wild egg collections from Lake Michigan were transferred to the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources for introduction into Lake Ontario. This international restoration project has relied on wild eggs collected on Lake Michigan or captive stocks developed by the Ontario Ministry to provide eggs for fingerling stocking into Lake Ontario. Due to the difficulty in collecting wild eggs on Lake Michigan in winter and the challenges presented by cross border transfers of live eggs and fish, it was prudent that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would create an “American” stock of captive bloater. These fish would serve as a consistent and disease free source of fertilized eggs to meet the needs of restoration goals in U.S. waters of the Great Lakes and provide a genetic reserve to established captive populations cultured by our Canadian partners.
In 2021, Jordan River added two additional year classes (2020, 2021) of wild bloater to the captive stocks on the hatchery. Most importantly, the fish originally collected back in 2018 as fertilized eggs from wild populations on Lake Michigan reached maturity and are producing viable eggs and sperm. This represents the first time this species had been reared to maturity within the National Fish Hatchery System. These fish, and the younger year classes, produce millions of eggs annually for the hatchery system and cooperator agencies that are involved in bloater restoration in the Great Lakes.
