$3 million visitor, education center to be added to Arkansas fish hatchery

MAMMOTH SPRING, Ark. -- The Mammoth Spring National Fish Hatchery will soon be the site of a $3 million Visitor and Environmental Education Center. The hatchery currently welcomes around 100,000 visitors each year. The center will be only the second such facility in the entire southeastern United States. The other one is in Jamestown, Ky.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service received $1.2 million for the Mammoth Spring project through an appropriation in 2005. The funds were to be used for the design of the center and construction of phase one of the project. An additional $1.75 million from Congress was recently granted and will be combined to pay for phase two of the project, which includes an environmental education classroom, retail sales space, additional office space, aquariums and interpretive exhibits, and outdoor features such as a display pond, boardwalks and viewing areas. The buildings alone will be more than 7,300 square feet.

"We will have something here that the community will be very proud of," said Richard Shelton, who serves as the hatchery manager. "And we're really striving to make it a place where people, especially children, can connect with nature," he said.

The Fish and Wildlife Service will break ground for the center this spring and expects to open the doors in 2010.

"We are excited," said Shelton, who has been promoting the idea of an environmental education center at Mammoth Spring for more than 15 years. "I'm thrilled that we are this close to making it a reality."

For the project, the Fish and Wildlife Service sponsored its first design-build competition, which awards contracts to firms that design a project that they will also build. That method "can save both time and money. It also eliminates the problem of design bids that can't actually be built within budget," Shelton said.

"We saw a lot of creative designs," said Joey Eldridge, an architect with the Fish and Wildlife Service who helped coordinate the competition. "And the competing firms had a huge incentive to give us the most for taxpayer money."

The winning design will incorporate green features such as a vegetable roof, geothermal heat source and solar power, along with an exhibit featuring a large wall aquarium and a wall of windows overlooking the Spring River.

The Mammoth Spring National Fish Hatchery has produced fish for fishing and for population restoration for more than a century. Shelton said the hatchery was built in 1903, set where it is by a nearby railroad needed at that time to move the fish, but more so for the reliable, high-quality, gravity-flow water from the world's 10th-largest spring.

"With our unique pond and raceway rearing system, the hatchery has the capability to produce a wide variety of fish and other aquatic species," he said.

Shelton said the hatchery maintains the largest captive spawning population of Gulf Coast striped bass in the world. "Biologists here are developing spawning and rearing techniques for paddlefish and lake sturgeon. The endangered alligator gar and Ozark Hellbender salamander, and the alligator snapping turtle," Shelton said.

Cooperating with Arkansas State University, the hatchery assists in nationwide efforts to protect and restore both endangered and nonendangered mussel populations. They accomplish this by developing culture techniques, investigating life histories and providing a refuge for endangered populations.