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Whether you like to catch fish, or just eat
it, you might be surprised to find out where
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a lot of that fish comes from. Many fish
populations have struggled, because of damage to their
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habitats or over-harvesting. Fortunately,
for anglers and fish lovers, fish hatcheries
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can supplement natural populations for both
commercial and recreational fishing. Because
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it's so important to keep the fish in hatcheries
healthy, a great deal of automation is required.
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Hi, Alexi here from Opto 22. Today, we're
here at Wolf Lake state fish hatchery, one
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of six fish hatcheries operated by Michigan's
Department of Natural Resources. They've invited
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us here today to show us how they hatch and
raise fish, as well as how they monitor and
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control these systems. Let's go take a look.
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>>Alexi: Hi. Today I'm here with Chris Klage
from Michigan's Department of Natural Resources.
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Chris, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
>>Chris: What I do is, I take care of the six
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hatcheries within Michigan, all the process
control and alarm monitoring systems within
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the hatcheries. We have four in the lower
peninsula and two in the upper peninsula as
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far as the hatcheries, and we raise a variety
of fish from brown trout to sturgeon to rainbow
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trout, for all public waters within Michigan.
>>Alexi: For the uninitiated like myself,
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can you tell us a little bit about what's
involved with the fish hatching process?
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>>Chris: From the beginning of the cycle of
fish hatching, we actually go out into the
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public waters. They call it stripping the
fish eggs from the female, fertilizing the
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eggs from the male, and bringing them back
to the hatchery. That's where our process
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starts. We actually go into the incubation,
we actually raise these fish to they call
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it a swim-up stage, or a fry. From that stage
the fish come from incubation into our indoor
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tanks. Depending on the species, but they
stay within the indoor tanks for approximately
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four to six months. And then from there, they
continue the rest of their life in the hatchery
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in the outdoor raceways, which is almost a year.
These fish are very delicate. Within a short
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period of time these fish can actually die
just from a lack of water, lack of oxygen.
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Well, my responsibility is to maintain the
alarm system within these hatcheries that
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monitor these processes. From the egg stage
to the actual, we call them a yearling stage,
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they are treated many different times. They
have certain medicated feeds, vaccines that
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we do. We try to raise a very healthy product.
So when we put a fish out back in the public
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waters, that fish has a good chance of survival.
>>Alexi: And where do the fish go when you release them?
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>>Chris: Actually, within the state of Michigan,
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every waterway you can imagine. Every little
lake, stream, some inland, some tributaries
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to all the Great Lakes, even some of
our fish actually make it to other states.
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>>Alexi: Can you give us an idea
of how many fish you produce?
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>>Chris: Depending on the facility, depending
on the size of the facility, anywhere between
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two and a half to six million fish. And what
we're trying to do is promote our product.
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Our product is fish. We try to sell licenses.
And so what we do is we try to offer visitor
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centers to the public to make them aware of
what we do. The most popular attraction at
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the visitor's center is the viewing pond,
where people can see six-foot sturgeon and
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then feed the other fish in the pond, from trout,
salmon, there's even some muskies and northern pike.
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>>Alexi: Because your primary goal is to keep these
fish healthy, obviously monitoring and alarming is
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crucial to your function. Can you tell us a little
bit about the monitoring systems you have in place?
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>>Chris: To keep it simple, I came up with
this little thing many years ago and I call
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it POW, which is power, oxygen, and water.
From there, within the six hatcheries, they
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branch off into about 900 different monitoring
points from that power, oxygen, and water.
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Power meaning the presence of, or the absence
of, at various pumps, motors, lift stations,
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the concentration of oxygen, and water. One
of our biggest concerns in any hatchery environment
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is thunderstorms. We are always within wet
locations, very low-lying areas with a lot
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of water. And of course lightning likes water
and low-lying areas. When I started doing
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a little research on Opto 22, I heard Opto 22
had modules--or actually one of their claims to
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fame was an optically-isolated relay. Well
with an optically-isolated, meaning, there's
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no direct connection for electricity to follow.
And that was a large selling point for me.
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Opto 22 has proven to be very reliable equipment.
Again this is a nine-year-old system now.
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A lot of the equipment that's out there is
the original equipment that was put in
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in 1999 and it's still operating wonderfully.
>>Alexi: What happens when an alarm occurs?
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>>Chris: A lot of our equipment is automated.
So there will be automatic generators that
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will start, the pumps will automatically start,
various other processes will automatically
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come back on. This is actually our HMI that
ties into the system. We have two of our main
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racks for the hatchery building and this is
actually where all of the alarms are reported
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to and logged to. So if your water does go
low, it actually gives you an alarm. If the
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temperature, if it goes too high, it actually
initiates a timer. And when that timer times
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out, if it doesn't hit its setpoint within
a certain time, that's when it shuts down
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and it just goes cold. You can't freeze
a fish, but you can boil them real easy.
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The temperature-controlled water comes in here,
through the top tray, from that top tray through
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each series of trays. These are filled with
your small eggs of your fish, different species.
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These are called heath trays. From the heath
trays they actually become fry, which is a
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small fish, and from the tray they'll go from
here out to the tanks in their tank room.
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>>Alexi: Great. Well, thanks Chris for showing
us your application. I sure learned a lot.
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And thank you for watching this video. For
more information visit Opto22.com. See you next time!