Somehow it seems like there should be more than this, more than this mass of frothing orange globules swirling around in a white plastic bucket. A minor miracle is taking place here, but this concoction looks more like an ice cream topping than the start of new life.

The round balls are chinook salmon eggs; each has one tiny hole, and at this very instant salmon sperm are swimming like mad to find those openings.

A visitor might expect test rubes, petri dishes, some sort of a laboratory atmosphere at least; but after fifteen years of work at this operation, Lawrence Vano, the manager of the Whitehorse Rapids Fish Hatchery, knows that this low-tech approach works just fine.

"They're already fertilized," says Vano, peering into the bucket. "When you see that foam, you know it is working."

The hatchery was established in 1984 to offset losses of juvenile chinook salmon that are sucked through the turbines on their way downstream or pass over the dam's spillway. It is estimated that every year about 20 percent of the salmon do not make it past the dam.

Like other salmon populations up and down the Pacific coast, the Yukon River salmon run has not been faring well the last few years. But things are looking better in 2001, as nearly 1,000 salmon have made it upstream as far as the fish ladder, compared to only 677 salmon last year.

The other good news is that 77 percent of the returning fish were wild salmon. For the past three years, about 70 percent of the returning salmon have been hatchery fish, a trend that was beginning to worry fishery managers.

"This is a great year," confirms Vano, as he hauls a particularly large male out of a holding tank. "What this is showing me is that the big fish are still there, which is really good."

But he is equally glad to pull a hatchery fish out of the tank, which he can identify by its clipped dorsal fin and the metal tag in its nose. "This shows us that these fish are actually making it to the ocean; that they are surviving the lake system and the dam."

Some fish are in beautiful shape, with scarcely a mark on them, while others look like weary survivors, their bodies showing the rigours of their almost 3,000-kilometre upstream journey.

Vano and Sandra Beitz, an assistant at the hatchery, harvest milt, or sperm, from male salmon ranging in age from three to seven years. While they only need a small amount of sperm from each of the males, they try to retrieve every last ripe egg from the female salmon.

Each female salmon produces about 6,000 eggs, and much of this crop gushes out in an impressive flood when their bellies are squeezed. The rest of the eggs are removed by cutting open the fish's belly, and removing the skein, the flap of tissue to which the eggs are attached until they are ripe.

Each female's eggs are divided into two batches so that they can be fertilized separately with sperm from two different males. This procedure, known as matrix spawning, helps to increase the genetic diversity of the hatchery fish.

In total this year, eggs were retrieved from 51 females, and sperm was harvested from between 70 and 80 male salmon. The fertilized eggs are washed, laid out on trays in the incubator and then the waiting game begins.

The fertilized eggs hatch in November, and in February the young will be dumped into one of the six large circular tanks that now hold the adult salmon. In early June, between 250,000 and 300,000 marked fry are released into one of four creeks flowing into the upper Yukon River.

About 80 percent of the hatchery eggs make it to the fry stage, compared to 10 percent for wild fish. But once the salmon start moving away from their home streams, the odds quickly worsen.

Out of the thousands of eggs deposited by a spawning wild female salmon, an average of two adult salmon will make it back to their spawning ground. The rest are eaten by other fish or animals higher up the food chain, caught by humans or killed by disease.

This hatchery is further north than any other Canadian salmon hatchery, and is now used for rearing freshwater fish such as lake and bull trout as well as salmon. It is owned by the Yukon Energy Corporation and managed by the Yukon Fish and Game Association and the Yukon Department of Renewable Resources.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada is responsible for managing the chinook fishery, and the increase in the total return, as well as in the percentage of returning wild fish, is the first good news that the department has had in a few years with this run.

For more information on the Whitehorse Rapids Fish Hatchery, call 668-3938.