During the annual fall salmon run, the fish return to their birth rivers to spawn. In Vermont, landlocked Atlantic salmon get a bit of extra help with this process at the Ed Weed Fish Culture Station in Grand Isle. The native salmon population in Lake Champlain was eradicated more than a century ago, but restocking efforts that began in the 1970s have led to modest population growth. Today, most of Vermont’s salmon are raised in fish hatcheries. The Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department’s five fish culture stations raise and release more than 1 million fish every year to boost populations and provide anglers with fresh catches.
For the latest episode of “Stuck in Vermont,” Seven Days senior multimedia producer Eva Sollberger visited the Ed Weed station twice in November to watch a fish biologist tag, measure, weigh and observe salmon at the outflow trap at Hatchery Brook. She also observed fish culturists retrieve thousands of eggs from salmon at the brood-stock holding facility. The 331,800 salmon eggs fertilized this season will hatch around Christmas and be raised at the station throughout 2026. About 156,000 salmon will be released into Lake Champlain and several of its tributaries in spring 2027, when they are seven inches long.
Sollberger spoke with Seven Days about filming the episode.
What drew you to this story now?
Nothing says “Happy holidays” like a video about fish spawning, am I right? These fish eggs will hatch around Christmas, which is a nice present. I had no idea how much work was happening behind the scenes to restore the lake’s salmon population. It seemed like something people might be interested in.
What did you learn?
Working with fish is cold and wet. The salmon are not pleased about being removed from the water, and they thrash around quite a bit. It takes strength and dexterity to net them and lift them between tanks. The fish collected at Hatchery Brook swim upstream from the lake to spawn. They are given an aquatic anesthetic before they are examined, and not all of them are chosen for brood stock. Paige Blaker, a fish culture specialist and the manager of the Ed Weed station, explained her vetting process: “We wanna make sure that we have truly 100 percent ripe eggs and milt for use for fertilization.”
Do salmon have to get in the mood for spawning?
The males are pretty much always ready to go (typical), but the females have to be “ripe,” with eggs loose in the body cavity, before the eggs can be extracted. The milt, or fish semen, is poured on top of the eggs to fertilize them in a process nicknamed “syrup on pancakes.” There is nothing sexy about the process. I was hoping to hear Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” over the speakers, but it was all business during my visit.
Tell us about a fish called Bertha.
Many of these salmon swim upstream from the lake to the fish culture station where they were born, guided by their olfactory senses. How wild is that? As Blaker said, “The spawning season is always really special because a lot of the fish are ours. And if they’re coming back in great numbers, then it means that we did our job correctly.”
Bertha is a salmon who came back to Hatchery Brook three years in a row and provided thousands of eggs during her visits. Unlike Pacific salmon, which die after spawning, Atlantic salmon can spawn a number of times. Although Bertha didn’t return this year, her genetics will live on in her descendants, who are probably still swimming in the lake.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Born to Run | Grand Isle’s Ed Weed Fish Culture Station is restoring Lake Champlain’s landlocked Atlantic salmon population”
This article appears in The Reading Issue 2025.
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