It’s just before noon, and I’m sitting on the shore of the Meadow Creek Pond in Roy, Utah. A large truck with a white rectangular tank attached to the back pulls up to the pond’s edge. The driver is a Utah Division of Wildlife Resources fish hatchery employee, and in the tank are hundreds of slimy, gray catfish, waiting to be released into the water.
“What's going on today is we've purchased and brought from Arkansas thousands and thousands of catfish…and we're going to be placing these catfish in these community ponds,” said Mark Hadley, the UDWR’s Northern Region Outreach Manager.
Each year, the Division stocks community ponds with fish, with the goal of giving anglers more fishing opportunities across the state. Channel catfish are a popular game fish because they’re easy and exciting to catch. They also tolerate warmer temperatures as ponds heat up during the summer months.
Instead of investing in warm-water fish hatcheries within Utah, Hadley said it’s more cost-effective to import them.
“The fish hatcheries we have here in Utah, we're mostly focused on raising cold-water fish, especially trout…it's actually cheaper to go ahead and get those catfish again from outside the state and bring them here than it would be to try to, you know, buy land for a fish hatchery,” Hadley said.
Approximately 900 catfish of varying sizes were stocked into Meadow Creek Pond. Hadley said the idea is to stock large fish anglers will want to keep, and smaller fish that might be released back into the pond.
“By putting some of the smaller catfish in as well, we're thinking that anglers might release some of those fish back into the water,” Hadley explained. “And so what we're trying to do is provide catfish fishing for anglers over a longer period of time.”
Find recently stocked ponds across Utah at https://dwrapps.utah.gov/fishstocking/Fish, or explore an interactive fish map here: https://dwrapps.utah.gov/fishing/
