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(CONTRIBUTED PHOTO | RYAN ROGERS) Eight of the 42 ponds which are at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department Possum Kingdom Fish Hatchery. The facility has 27 surface acres of ponds and produces about around 2.5 million fingerlings a year which consists mostly of striped bass, smallmouth bass, channel catfish and rainbow trout. -
(CONTRIBUTED PHOTO | RYAN ROGERS) Employees of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department Possum Kingdom Fish Hatchery take measurements of a fish in one of the 42 ponds at the facility.
The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department Possum Kingdom Fish Hatchery plays an important role in stocking fish for water bodies throughout the state while supporting the outdoor industry.
Possum Kingdom Fish Hatchery Manager Ryan Rogers spoke with the Rotary Club of Graham this month regarding the facility and how facilities across the state are an important part of wildlife management.
“There’s five freshwater hatcheries throughout the state of Texas. We stock out roughly about 35 million fish a year combined through the five of us. My hatchery is the smallest hatchery. It’s the only original hatchery in the system,” Rogers said. “At one point there were about 15 of us and they collapsed us down into five and they started building in the 80s what they called the mega hatcheries, (...) they’re just really large hatcheries. Most of them have at least 35-to-45 surface acres of water, except mine is 27. It’s one of the original hatcheries. (...) They opened the hatchery in 1950 and we’re still operating the same ponds that they built back then. A lot of the facilities around it are newer. The other hatcheries have all opened more recently and they’re much bigger. Most of them produce largemouth bass, which is kind of our trophy fish in Texas. We’re the outlier in that regard. We don’t produce largemouth bass.”
TPWD manages the fisheries of the state with over 2,000 bodies of water and hundreds of thousands of miles of rivers. Rogers said that management comes in different forms.
“We manage through habitat management, we manage them through regulation, so fishing regulations, and then we also manage them by stocking,” he said. “We stock fish through the Sport Fish Restoration Program, it’s a federal grant program. You guys have heard of sporting goods excise tax (...). The money that you pay in taxes whenever you buy fuel for your boats, when you buy fishing poles and stuff like that, (...) we get about 75% of our funding through that. But the last 25% we get from your fishing license. So we use that money to make sure that there are fish for you to catch if you are out fishing in the lakes around the state.”
For the full story, see the Wednesday, Dec. 21 edition of The Graham Leader.
