Raising Fish
You can lead a fish to water, but can you make him spawn? 

Did you know that you could "fool" fish into thinking its spawning season? That’s what we learned from Michael Rust at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center (NWFSC), a division of NOAA where they do experiments with such things.

Adult lingcod and sablefish have a specific spawning season that is limited to about three months during the winter. They know it’s time to spawn by the photoperiod—the lengthening and shortening of the days. Which of course would mean that in the summer the days are longer, and in the winter, the days are shorter. Sound pretty easy doesn’t it? But what if this changes? What happens to the fish then?

According to Michael, "We can fool fish into thinking winter is summer or summer is fall and so on by simulating seasonal changes with lights." In other words, they slowly and carefully change the amount of time the lights are on each day to simulate the seasonal changes, so that it fools the fish. They can speed up or slow down the seasons whenever needed. Or as Michael put it, "We can also lengthen or shorten years using this method." Michael also says "This way we can have four groups of fish with one group always thinking that it’s spawning time." And this is all done with ActiveHome timers and controllers.

They use the ActiveHome controllers to control the lights from day to day by programming in the times that the lights are supposed to turn on and off making each day just a little longer, or a little shorter.

They also use X10 controllers to control lights and feeders in a fish nutrition lab. "We use a standard clock controller to turn the lights on for 16 hours of light: 8 hours dark constant photo period. This makes the fish think it’s always summer and they grow faster."

Wouldn’t that have been great growing up as kids? No matter what time of the year it was, we could make it always summer.

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