Syracuse.com - DEC's aquarium building at New York State Fair gives closeup view of live, wild fish

[HuntingNY-News]

It's also the place where visitors can buy their state fishing, hunting and trapping licenses, and where there's a display on the wall of many replicas of state record-sized fish.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation fish aquarium building, one of the most popular attractions at the state fair, is sandwiched between the Times Warner and the Dairy buildings at the state fairgrounds.

The building contains five, 1,000-gallon tanks. In four are freshwater fish representing a good sampling of the state's freshwater fishery. The other contains a sampling of turtles and frogs.

It's also the place where visitors can buy their state fishing, hunting and trapping licenses, and where there's a display on the wall of many replicas of state record-sized fish. The five aquaria, though, are the big draw.

"If you took a survey of those who visit the fair, the aquaria are probably the number one thing for people to see," said Carl Rathje, the assistant director of the DEC's Oneida Hatchery in Constantia, who has been in charge of setting up the live fish display at the fair since 1981. He was interviewed earlier this week as a small, truck-load of trout were being unloaded and placed in one of the tanks.

John Gray, a DEC fish culturist from the Oneida Fish Hatchery handles a net full of trout for the DEC aquarium at the New York State Fair.Mike Greenlar | [email protected] 

Q: What's involved in setting up these aquariums each year?

A: They were built in the 1940s or 50s and are pretty antiquated. They remain here all year. We have to come down here more than a week before the fair begins, put water in them and clean them out. We set up filtering system in each one using a regular pool filter, along with placing chiller units in each one to keep the water at a desired temperature. Its city water and we add a chemical to take the chlorine out.

Where do you get the fish?

Most of the fish are netted out of Oneida Lake. They're constantly being recycled in and out every few days. They're returned back to the lake, and new ones are put in to replace them. We try to get the whole gamut of what's in New York state as far as warm water fish, including game fish like small and largemouth bass, pickerel, northern pike, walleye, along with all sorts of panfish, carp, suckers, bullheads, freshwater drum. We also put in a couple of exotic species - a sturgeon and a paddlefish, which we raise at the Oneida hatchery. We've had tiger muskie in here before, but the bigger the fish, the harder it is to handle them. Generally, it's not feasible to bring in large game fish. We just want to get a representative sample.

Apart from them, we have large, brood (breeder) trout and yearling trout that we truck in from the DEC fish hatchery in Randolph at the western end of the state. There's 18 of those this year. We have brown, brook and rainbow trout. In total, there's as many as 100 fish in these tanks.

What's the water temperature?

We keep it between 50 and 60 degrees for the trout, and from 60 to 70 degrees for all the other fish.

Ever have any breakdowns, such as power outages where fish die? What do you do with the dead fish?

Over the years we've had many situations. When I first started working here I was trained by this older guy and we used to sleep upstairs all night, staying here 24 hours. I remember coming down in the morning and the power had gone out ove night. We lost all the trout. Before the fair opened, we had to call another hatchery to bring new fish down and get them in the tank before the fair opened at 10. When fish die, we generally put them on ice and return them to the hatchery. On occasions, we've given some of our mortalities to the guy who has the raptors (birds of prey) at the fair. He feeds them to his birds.

Where do you get the frogs and turtles?

The turtles (there's four different species) are supplied by one of our workers Rickey (Bryant). There his pets. The frogs we catch ourselves in the creek by the hatchery.

And what about all those impressive replicas of the state- record fish?

My wife, Margaret, who's a taxidermist, did every one of them.

View the full article on The Syracuse Outdoors Blog