In an effort to enhance fishing throughout the state, as well as boost native fish populations, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources stocks a variety of fish species throughout Utah each year. In 2019, the division stocked more than 10 million fish into 603 local waterbodies, a total of more than 1.1 million pounds of fish, said DWR spokesperson Faith Jolley.
“The practice of stocking fish in the Beehive State goes back more than a century, as fish were first formally stocked in Utah in 1871,” said Jolley. “At that time, fish were transported from other states by train and were stocked into lakes along the train route. In 1898, Utah opened its first hatcheries for raising trout locally.
“These original hatcheries were really impounded streams where we put ‘fry’ that we got from the federal government,” DWR sportfish coordinator Randy Oplinger said. “We opened our first traditional fish hatchery – with raceways like we have today – where we produced our own eggs, in 1899 in Murray.”
Over time, the DWR expanded its fish hatchery operations, and there are now 13 facilities across Utah, said Jolley. The bulk of the fish stocked in 2019 came from these hatcheries, which produced 9.4 million of the total 10,081,077 fish stocked throughout the state. The other almost 680,000 were transported from various states across the U.S., including Arkansas and Wyoming, as well as from two federal fish hatcheries in Utah.
Full story: https://moabtimes.com/2019/12/27/dwr-st ... h-in-2019/
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