The numbers are a bit staggering. For example, a four-pound female walleye will produce about 100,000 eggs, or about 25,000 per pound of body weight. When ripe, the fish are stripped of their eggs and milt by hand, and fertilization is allowed to occur in plastic tubs. For about three minutes the mixture is stirred with a turkey tail feather, which is used because the soft feathers won't harm the eggs. Then a chemical is added that keeps the eggs from sticking together in a clump, which would cause some of them to die for lack of oxygenated water.
Fresh water is changed regularly for the first three hours.
This causes the eggs to harden and swell up. Each hatchery jar, which is fed by a steady stream of fresh water, holds about 270,000 walleye eggs. It's 21 to 23 days from fertilization to the time that the fry are finally seined from the raceway pools and moved outside. After a month in the ponds, the walleye are shipped in tank trucks to their stocking point. Walleye are produced in the hatchery each spring to supplement the limited reproduction that occurs in the wild.