In the game-fish industry, smelts are important as the 4-inch bait that coveted game fish such as salmon and bass love to eat. Yet until John Whalen came along, scientists and biologists said they could never be raised in a hatchery setting.

After 17 years of observing and studying smelts, however, Whalen is not only raising millions of smelt fry on his bait fish farm; he also has just obtained a $52,000 Innovative Research Grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop a feeding system for the fish that will allow them to grow larger and faster.

If he is able to succeed in raising full-grown smelts in a single year with his feeding system, Whalen likely will have a major impact on fisheries management practices.

Already, Whalen's fry - which are smaller than mosquito larvae and appear to the naked eye to be a pair of swimming eyeballs - are making an impact on the Moosehead Lake fishery. For three years, the Moosehead Lake Fisheries Coalition has been dumping Whalen's farm-raised smelts into the lake as game-fish food.

Recent inspections of the stomach contents of some of those game fish revealed Whalen's smelts in meaningful numbers.

"Something significant is going on there," Whalen said Monday. "We are now seeing some nice salmon growth."

The premise, he said, is simple: Stock the salmon right along with their favorite meal, smelts. The result is a win-win situation where the game-fish industry greatly benefits, the local economy benefits, Moosehead tourism benefits and, of course, Whalen benefits.

He said that Maine's Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife has been supportive of his efforts and has expressed interest in obtaining samples from Moosehead Lake and acquiring brood stock. Whalen asserted, however, that any stocking of smelts should be done privately, through lake associations, and overseen by DIFW.

It took Whalen 17 years to get to this point, and still he was shocked when he won the highly competitive USDA grant.

"Here were all these guys with Ph.D.s and research and development departments with six assistants, and I'm this little guy with some ponds in Canaan," Whalen said.

He credits his former 20-year career as a Maine game warden for part of his success. Patience and observation were qualities he needed as a warden and now as a fish farmer.

"The problem with smelts is that the window of opportunity is small when you are working with spawning fish, just two to three weeks," he said. "If you fail, you must wait another year."

Asked how he dealt with those years of failures, Whalen quickly said: "They're not failures. I look at them as successes because I eliminated something that didn't work."

Whalen said his business can take the pressure off the wild harvest of smelts, which can bring $8 to $12 a dozen. He hopes to develop a turnkey system that he can sell to others. "We will have the fry available, the feed available, the technical assistance available," he said.

It is this positive attitude that Whalen said he will bring to this new phase of his research. "There is no scientific research available on this, on what the smelt's diet requirements are," the fish farmer said. "We are out here pioneering by ourselves."

The income generated by his bait business selling shiners and suckers has financed the smelt hatchery so far, and he said that in addition to the $52,000 in federal grant funds, he will put an additional $40,000 of his own money into the project.

Whalen has been working with David Berlinky of the University of New Hampshire, an associate professor of zoology.

"We aren't absolutely certain we can develop a system that works," he admitted, "but I'm the kind of guy that sees the glass half-full. I know it will be full when I'm through."
"This content originally appeared as a copyrighted article in the Wednesday, May 17, 2006 edition of the Bangor Daily NEWS and is used here with permission."