Warmer temps made fish suffocate in Jamaica Pond

Oddly the Commonwealth doesn't reference white perch in its hatchery system.

http://www.mass.gov/eea/agencies/dfg/dfw/about-masswildlife/state-fish-h...

However, there is a hatchery in West Virginia that sources them.

http://www.zettsfishhatchery.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/Com...

And Maine stocks em too.

Some background from a pdf they have. It's a management plan

http://www.maine.gov/ifw/fishing/species/management_plans/whiteperch.pdf

White perch are closely related to striped bass, which live principally in salt or brackish water. Although both species are capable of living in salt water, they both spawn in fresh water.

The white perch spawns mainly in the spring at water temperatures around 59-60 degrees F.
Spawning takes place in shallow water over almost any bottom type. The total number of eggs
per female varies from 20,000 to 300,000 depending on the size of the fish. A 6-inch long perch
would have approximately 22,000 eggs. The eggs hatch in 4-5 days at 59-60 degrees F. The
average life span is 5-7 years. Perch can survive and often thrive in most Maine lakes and ponds
of approximately 50 acres or more in size and about 25 feet or more in depth if the deeper water
is not depleted of oxygen during the winter months.

Perch are considered to be a warmwater fish because they seek out and grow better in warmer water. White perch do better in waters that reach a temperature of 75 degrees F. or higher in the summer months. Perch eat most small creatures that other fish eat, and large perch will eat most small fish including their own species.

Where conditions are favorable, white perch form very large populations that occasionally
dominate the waters they inhabit. Their reproductive potential is so great that only major
mortalities induced by unfavorable weather at spawning time can cause failures in certain year
classes. Loss of year classes, however, causes few problems in the management of white perch.

Usually the problem is one of too many small perch. Even small, slow-growing perch can mature
and spawn successfully thus preserving a population. Fishermen prefer larger perch for food and
sport and are likely to complain when the perch are all small.

Zetts will sell you a truckload.

Note the last paragraph about mortality causes..unfavorable weather at spawning time.

I'm mainly parroting the argument I've heard from fishing purists and should have made the DNA role more specific. Anadromous fish in the wild will have facets of their birth stream encoded in their DNA. It's how they know where to swim upstream.

But, in the case of, say, trout, if you dump a brown trout born in a hatchery in Montague in a tributary of the Parker River in Newbury, it'll have to wing it on spawning locations.

Hatchery fish of all species are said to be less hardy.

There was a round of arguments several years ago about the hazards of Atlantic Salmon fish farming and their escape from pens

Here's a paper from a marine science journal on that situation.

http://icesjms.oxfordjournals.org/content/63/7/1159.full