Hatchery

For the third season episode of , see "Hatchery (Enterprise episode)".

A hatchery is a facility where eggs are hatched under artificial conditions, especially those of fish or poultry.

Assynt Salmon Hatchery, near Inchnadamph in Scottish Highlands

Fish hatcheries are used to cultivate and breed a large number of fish in an enclosed environment. It usually involves manual labour. A hatchery worker will take a female fish, release her eggs (stripping), and then externally add the male fish's sperm (milt), mix them and allow them to fertilize and incubate undisturbed, where there is less risk of disease or being eaten. They can immediately dispose of any unfertilized eggs. What happens next depends on the purpose of the hatchery. Fish farms use hatcheries to cultivate fish to sell for food, or ornamental purposes, eliminating the need to find the fish in the wild and even providing some species outside of their natural season. They raise the fish until they are ready to be eaten or sold to aquarium stores. Other hatcheries release the juvenile fish into a river, lake or the ocean for recreational fishing or to supplement the natural numbers of threatened or endangered species. Some fish hatcheries are used to mitigate the effects of a facility, such as a dam, hydroelectric plant or water diversion. These hatcheries usually raise anadromous fish that are unable to migrate due to the obstruction, particularly salmon.

Merits of hatchery and show poultry

Although hatcheries attempt to produce quantity rather than quality, this can be seen in a positive light as well. There are many stories about people with show birds that were awesome quality, but they couldn’t get enough eggs from them to perpetuate the good quality of the line. Since hatcheries select for production, it is an obvious fact that one can expect hatchery birds to lay plenty of eggs.

For this reason, breeding mediocre hatchery birds into a show line that has poor production might be a way to restore that line’s production qualities. This will of course significantly alter the offspring, and the first few generations will probably not even be show worthy, but by continuing to select the better producing offspring to breed back into the show line, one might manage to breed a flock that have show qualities as well as preserving production qualities. It would seem that since one of the reasons chickens were domesticated was to lay eggs. If the chickens that we raise today fail to lay enough eggs even to perpetuate their breed, is that not a serious flaw?

External links

[When does genetic diversity matter?] - Talks about some issues surrounding hatcheries

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