Saco Salmon Restoration Alliance & Hatchery
P.O. Box 115, Saco, ME 04072
We are a publicly funded all-volunteer non-profit organization. Our volunteers are continuing to contribute between 2000 and 3000 hours yearly to keep our salmon hatchery in operation.
Saco Salmon Restoration Alliance & Hatchery – 2024 News
January 2024
In 2023, volunteers contributed 2008 hours to help maintain the hatchery and our organization.
Sarah Bourdeau and Mia Meister are UNE students who have joined our volunteer staff, and they will be helping us until May 2024.
February 2024
We have two UNE citizenship volunteers helping at the hatchery. Anna Sinclair and Tyler Druck. Citizenship volunteers are requested to complete fifteen hours of volunteer service.
Dan and Denis have developed a self-contained system for incubating eggs that we receive from the University of New England (UNE) Marine Science Center (MSC), and it is currently operational. We received some small fertilized wild Atlantic salmon eggs from our UNE broodstock which Denis is incubating to see if any will eye-up.
Our Fish Friends volunteers, Pam, David, and Connor are making sure that the twelve area schools that are participating have the necessary equipment and supplies and are prepared to receive eyed up eggs for educational purposes. The schools are then provided with instructions on how to set up and operate their aquariums. For this season, eyed-up eggs will be sourced from the Green Lake Fish Hatchery for the Fish Friends program and the schools will receive their eggs on March 6th.
As of 2/5/24, the hatchery volunteers are taking care of sixteen e-fished parr and sixty-nine smolts that are 3.5 – 4.5 years old. The UNE MSC is holding 121 broodstock.
The broodstock is getting older and it is now becoming more of a problem getting good eggs from the ageing broodstock. We will be having meetings with UNE, Division of Marine Resources (DMR), Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (IF&W) and NOAA to discuss if we can get more adults, smolts or Parr for the program.
We are working on securing eyed up eggs for 2025 from another source that is south of us for the Fish Friends program and egg planting.
March 2024
UNE stocked fifty wild Atlantic salmon in the lower Saco River below Cataract Falls on March 10th. That leaves seventy-one salmon broodstock in the tank at the UNE GMSC.
April 2024
UNE has decided to cancel our agreement for the broodstock program and return the remaining salmon to our hatchery in May. The reason is that they are upgrading the MSC to manage all life stages of the entire broodstock program. UNE has received funding from another source for the upgrades to the MSC and will not need to be funded this year from SSRA&H for the broodstock program.
May 2024
Seventy-one salmon broodstock were returned to the hatchery from UNE on May 11th. We now have a total of one hundred fifty-five wild Atlantic salmon in the hatchery to take care of.
All the student volunteers have finished their volunteer hours at the hatchery. Our regular staff will take care of the salmon until next fall when the UNE students return to school.
June – July 2024
One UNE graduate student is helping us this summer along with our regular staff. We are maintaining the hatchery and performing maintenance as needed to keep the salmon happy and the hatchery operational.
Newsletter prepared by Garry Kasten
Thank you all for your generous support.