Fish Hatcheries

Fish feed made with a contaminated Chinese ingredient was distributed to about 120 fish hatcheries and farms, roughly split between the United States and Canada, officials said. U.S. officials said the risk to people from eating fish that ate the contaminated feed was very low. The feed, manufactured by Skretting Canada, used imported Chinese wheat flour, purchased from a second Canadian company, that was spiked with melamine and mislabeled as wheat gluten.

About 100,000 young steelhead trout have been found dead at a fish-breeding facility, setting back efforts to restore the threatened species. Hatchery workers discovered about 100 adult and 100,000 yearlings floating Friday in the Coyote Valley Dam fish imprinting facility at Lake Mendocino, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

It's a still morning on the shore of Hesperia Lake, but the winds of change are stirring. Fishermen are bundled in sweatshirts. On previous mornings, they were in shirt sleeves. Fred McDaniel has been fishing for catfish all summer. Now he's concerned about those pesky trout. "If I catch a trout, I'll give it away," he says. Across the cove is Robert Abbett, a trout fisherman trying to avoid those annoying catfish. "I don't eat catfish; I only eat trout," he says.

Post-spawn salmon from the California Fish and Game Department program to replenish fisheries are headed for the freezers of needy Indian families. As part of the industrial-style management of salmon, the state intercepts migrating fish in fall and winter and collects eggs and sperm to rear new fish for release to streams. Adult salmon die soon after spawning, but now they won't go to waste.

To feed America's growing appetite for seafood, the Bush administration Tuesday proposed a dramatic expansion of fish farms into offshore federal waters to grow salmon, tuna and other fish that now mostly come in as imports. The proposal is designed to help fish farming expand from a $1-billion to a $5-billion industry in the next 20 years, and to reduce America's reliance on imported seafood and shrink the U.S. trade deficit. More than 70% of seafood eaten in the United States is imported.

IN LOS ANGELES, BUSINESSES SOMETIMES team up to improve local shopping districts. In the eastern Sierra, they do it to buy fish food. Hatcheries are a matter of economic survival for the state's mountain tourism industry, but because of repeated cuts in the budget of the state Fish and Game Department, they're in trouble. In response, businesses and local governments in Mono County raised about $100,000 for fish food and fuel for the Hot Creek hatchery near the town of Mammoth Lakes.

A San Diego firm announced Thursday that it wants to use an old oil platform off Ventura County to create a commercial fish farm, the first of its kind on the West Coast to specialize in fin fish. The nonprofit Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute wants to use Venoco Inc.'s decommissioned Grace platform, in waters about 10 miles west of Ventura, to build an experimental operation that could produce up to 300 tons of fish annually.