Illustrating the Eggs

Each year, students at Northeast Elementary in Ithaca, NY  raise brook trout.  As will all our Brook Trout classes, they receive eggs in early November but have to wait a week or more for the eggs to hatch.  Here's a great activity to help the time pass.

Master Teacher Paula Kilts (who recently retired and we miss her already!) would introduce scientific illustration... carefully drawing what you see... as a way to begin important observations, and get the creative juices flowing, even before the eggs hatch.

The end result combines careful observation and illustration with a little poetry.  These works will be the first in a series of journaling activities as the trout develop and grow!

Brook Trout Eggs have Arrived!

Brook trout eggs were delivered on November 8, courtesy of our friends at US Fish & Wildlife's Cortland office (thanks Gian Dodici!) and the DEC's hatchery in Morrisville, NY.  

Notice the visible eyes... these eggs will be hatching soon!

Today was a reminder that we've still a ways to go to get back to normal.  The arrival of eggs is usually a boisterous event, with students mobbing the tank, excited and asking lots of questions.  This year, we're still keeping it low key, but we're excited to be visiting classes again! ~Bill F.

DO TROUT YAWN?

We'll be publishing interesting questions that come up when we visit classes... sometimes we might even provide an answer!  Here's our first installment, asked by Saatva, and Cayuga Heights Elementary.

Do Fish Yawn?

This is a surprisingly complex question, because we don’t actually know quite how to define a “yawn”.  And that's because we don’t actually know what “yawning” does. 

The most convincing theory currently (many have been disproven over the years) is that yawning serves to cool down the mammalian brain, which fatigues as it warms up. If that is the case, than it is unlikely to benefit fish since, as "ectotherms" - cold blooded animals - their body temperature is controlled by their environment anyway. SO, if that sounds right to you, than the answer would be, "No, fish do not yawn."  BUT, if you are not convinced that yawning cools your brain, and there must be some other explanation… than maybe they do!  Here are some cool pix to help you consider...

(Shout out to www.thenakedscientists.com for great take on this subject.)

Trout in the Classroom is GO for the 2021-2022 School Year!

 Friends, 

We are up and running this fall, and it's Halloween, already.  About time I get this blog active!  

Thanks for catching this spooky situation, Liz McCheyne!

We've got just about all of our "pre-COVID" schools back this year, and we are up to 24 aquariums at 18 schools (list below).  We've completed aquarium setups and brown trout eggs were delivered October 7.  Brook trout eggs will be arriving next week (about Nov. 8).  We are also having a great time meeting all the students participating this year.

~Bill

Participating Schools, Fall 2021 to Spring 2022

Dryden Middle & High Schools

Groton Elementary & Middle Schools

Ithaca School District

Belle Sherman Elementary

Caroline Elementary

Cayuga Heights Elementary

Enfield Elementary

Fall Creek Elementary

Northeast Elementary

South Hill Elementary 

Lansing Elementary

         Newfield Middle School

South Seneca Elementary

Trumansburg Middle School

TST BOCES Smith School

Union Springs Middle School  

       Tompkins Center for History & Culture (demo tank)

 We completed our first class trout release of the season with students at Caroline Elementary school this past Thursday (May 20), taking advantage of the school's wonderful "Wilderness Campus" trail system that runs along Six Mile Creek.  

Students observed and evaluated stream (riparian) zone conditions along the trail, noting ground cover, erosion potential, shading and diversity.  They also recalled animal sitings from trail cams place along the trail by Cayuga Nature Center, which is pretty cool. 

Once we got to the stream, we got set up to collect and assess stream macroinvertebrates using the "Water Quality Report Card" developed by the Community Science Institute.

Students from Anna Chapman's and Jen Wilkie's 4th grades felt the stream was in pretty good shape, and found LOTS of mayfly larvae, stoneflies, crayfish and other cool critters living amongst the rocks. 

These creatures are all great food for young trout, of course, so we decided this would be a good habitat to release the students' young trout into.  Each student got to release one or two of the trout they've been raising all year... they are in the containers that each student is carefully managing!

Stream Ecology at Caroline Elementary!

 Now that spring is in the air and we can work outdoors, we are super excited to be able to meet with some of our students again in person, once again!  Bill joined 4th graders at Caroline Elementary to think about how our streams are closely connected with the land around them, and how students can use basic observations to tell whether a stream is a healthy habitat.    

It all happened on the awesome outdoor campus area behind Caroline Elementary, which offers fantastic access to Six Mile Creek.

Where yours truly braved 30 degree temperatures to demonstrate stream sampling techniques our students will do themselves in May, and where we all paused to comtemplate the sounds and sights and smells of the stream!

Students used Chromebooks and Dichotimous Stream MacroInvertebrate Keys to identify all kinds of cool stuff!

Finally, we used the Community Science Institute's "Water Quality Report Card" to decide if the stream was healthy and "unimpacted" by pollution or human activity.  Good news!  It tested very well!

Great work Caroline students... stay tuned for more!   ~ Bill F.

Happy Earth Day!

 Hi friends!

Come celebrate Earth Day in a virtual event at 7pm tonight to test your climate knowledge!

Over the last year the outdoors have become even more important as a space where we can play and learn, where it's easy to stay social distanced, and where masks don't make breathing quite so difficult. Let's celebrate the beauty of our natural environment today and enjoy the life and water around us!

An important part of taking care of our environment is keeping it clean and healthy from pollutants, and the easiest for us to help clean up is trash. Trash is an especially large issue for waterways, so there are some clean up and Earth Day events happening this weekend to help take care of our streams and lake.

April 24th:

• (all day) The City of Ithaca is holding their Annual Six Mile Creek cleanup between Meadow St. and Cayuga St., bags will be provided by the corner of S. Titus and Plain and can be returned there filled with recycling or trash.
• (9:30am) There is an Embrace the Lake event to cleanup trash along the drainage swales in the road along the front of the Ithaca Walmart. 
• (9:00am) Help cleanup along Route 13 between the Stewart Park and Triphammer exits, starting at East Shore Drive near Stewart Park in the parking lot for the old Chamber of Commerce building. 
• (10:00am) Meet outdoors at the Sciencenter to celebrate Earth Day fun for the whole family.

April 25th: 

• (all day) The City of Ithaca is continuing the Annual Six Mile Creek cleanup between Meadow and Cayuga.

And if you would rather wait until May because April is still too cold, we have other events coming up to keep your Earth Day spirit strong. 

May 1st: 

• (10:00am - 12:00pm) Celebrate I Love My Parks day with a cleanup event at Stewart Park.

May 11th:

• The Sciencenter will be releasing their trout from our Trout in the Classroom program, more information to come!
  

When you're outside today, even if it's just for a moment, look around you and find a way to make your environment a little cleaner, a little healthier. 

Trout Are Made From Trees

Hi friends!

Trout Are Made From Trees

Did you know that your trout are made from maples and other trees and vegetation? This might sound a little crazy, but trees are actually an important part of the food web for trout and micro-invertebrates in streams. 

This time of year, we're just coming to the close of maple sap and syrup season. The temperature warming to many days together above freezing is encouraging the buds and flowers on our trees, telling us the time for boiling maple sap in the cold is coming to an end. I want you to watch the leaves come in on these trees, especially if you live near a stream or creek or if you visit one frequently. These same leaves could become an energy source for your fish. 

This warming spring time is also when we start to explore our streams and look for macro-invertebrates. These insect larvae that live in streams are incredibly important to our trout's survival. When we release our trout, sometime in May or June, we will look for macro-invertebrates to make sure we are releasing our trout into a healthy ecosystem with lots of food for them to find and hunt. 

The leaves that we watch grow on the trees near streams will become integral in the autumn, as they fall into the streams and begin to be decomposed. The decomposing leaves will be the perfect food for the macro-invertebrates that will grow to be the food for your trout. This food web links our trees and trout, keeping the energy put from the trees into the leaves in the stream ecosystem as it becomes energy for the trout. 

How do trout breathe??

 Hi everyone!

Check out this video of a trout breathing shared with us by South Seneca 5th grade teacher Liz McCheyne. You can't see from the angle in the video, but the trout is breathing by bringing water through its mouth and into its gills (which you can see moving). How fast do you think the trout is breathing? Can you count the number of breaths in the 20 second interval?

Oxygen is mixed into the water as it runs
over the rocks above Upper Treman falls.

Trout breathe through a process called diffusion, where oxygen in the water moves across a membrane in the trout's gills and into their bloodstream. Much like when we breathe air, the concentration of oxygen in the water determines how quickly the trout breathes and how much oxygen is brought into the blood with each breath. In the videos of our trout releases and in our classroom visits, we often talk about our trout needing cold water. This is because cold water is able to hold more oxygen, allowing the fish to breathe more easily without stressing their gills.

Our fish in the tank at South Hill
Elementary have an air bubbler
  to add oxygen to their water.

Did you count how fast the trout breathes in the video? How do you think that would change in colder water? In warmer water? Do you think the trout's breathing in the video is only related to water temperature? Might the trout breathe faster if stressed by being out of the tank and under observation?






South Seneca's classroom was one of the only ones to still have trout after our emergency release in 2020, out of our 20 Trout in the Classrooms that year, check out her trout respiration experiment! We work with a whole host of amazing teachers in our programs, so shout out to all the teachers out there who are putting in extra time and effort to create virtual and in person lesson plans. Discover Cayuga Lake is here for you! 

Did you know trout burp?!

 Hi friends!

Check out this video of a trout burping and keep reading to find out how it works!

Ever wondered how your trout can move up and down in their tank or in a lake? It may seem as simple as them just swimming up or down, but the physics are actually much more complicated. Water has different densities and more or less pressure at different depths, so your trout has to adjust as it moves through a water column (if you think about your body of water as an excel sheet, the column is the up and down dimension).

Your trout moves through the column of water by adjusting its buoyancy (fancy word for how much it floats or sinks). To adjust to different depths of water and change between them, your trout has a swim bladder. This swim bladder can fill with air to make the trout more buoyant, so that it floats, or less buoyant, so that it sinks. Swim bladders can be found in trout and salmon and are connected to their throat, so they can pull air into and out of them as they breathe (it's a little like you closing off your lungs when you swallow so you don't pull liquid into them). To release the air the trout burps, like you would after drinking a lot of soda.

Sometimes when a trout is caught in deep water it doesn't have enough time to adjust its swim bladder before it comes to the surface, when that happens you can have to manually burp the trout, as in the video above. If the trout doesn't burp and you release it, it will float belly up if it has too much air in its swim bladder, and can die before it's able to release the air.

You can check out a trout burping in person next time you're fishing with your family!

Wild Winter Baby Trout

We've been observing our trout hunting and eating zooplankton in captivity, but what about all the baby trout in the wild? Will they have the upper fin in hunting and competing for food when we release our captive trout? Is a winter stream environment a nurturing habitat for baby trout? Let's find out!

A baby wild trout has about 5 months of life in its stream habitat by this time in March and is known as a trout "fry" or "parr." Check out this cool video to see what a brook trout parr looks like at this time of year!

Upper Treman trout stream in May 2020.

Here are some cool facts about wild trout parrs and how they grow up: 

1. A wild trout parr will be smaller than a trout parr raised in captivity. This is because growing up in the wild is typically colder than growing up in a tank, the water can even be a temperature that would normally cause water to freeze if the stream is running fast enough! The colder the water a trout grows up in, the slower the trout will grow. 
   

2. 

   Stonefly larvae in June 2020.

   A wild trout parr starts hunting almost right away as soon as it can swim, and sometimes even before it can swim! While our captive trout learn to come up to the surface of the tank and beg for food, a wild trout looks for its food at the BOTTOM of a stream. This is called BENTHIC feeding and means that trout grow up mostly eating stonefly, mayfly, and caddisfly larvae that can be found hiding among the rocks of healthy streams. 
   
3. A wild trout parr will hunt and eat zooplankton, just like we watched with our captive trout in our recent feeding experiments! Wild parrs don't typically eat Daphnia (the zooplankton we fed our trout), but they do eat a different species of zooplankton... known as copepods. In fact, a common copepod that trout like to eat is called a calanoid and might look like a Plankton you've seen before (hint: Spongebob).
   

   

   Calanoid, a microscopic zooplankton.

So what do you think? Who has the upper fin? A trout that has grown up hunting and spent its whole life in the wild, or a larger trout that doesn't have as much experience hunting or hiding among the rocks? 

Trout Feeding Results!

We're almost done with live feeding experiments this year! Let's take a look at what we've found so far and some questions we might still have:

Based on the graph above we can see that we know our trout will eat daphnia, BUT each trout at each school behaves a little differently. These are cumulative (adding all together) numbers from each school, so we can see that there are particular times where trout find the daphnia and eat them right away. This is cool, but because the numbers are all together we miss how many trout didn't eat any at all or ate more than the number of daphnia we thought were introduced to that trout's beaker. 

Marina with South Hill trout experiments last week! 

At South Hill the other day: "My trout didn't eat anything at all!," proclaimed an upset 4th grader. She continued, "it didn't even move!" The other students at her table and the teacher agreed, the trout hadn't even moved. 

Following our classes it's not uncommon to see a complete lack of interest in the daphnia from at least one trout per classroom (South Hill that day had 5). Our students at South Seneca and Fall Creek came up with some ideas for changing the experiment to find out WHY some trout don't eat. 

"We could use a bigger container or put 2 or 3 trout together," suggest the 5th graders at South Seneca. Their observations led them to believe that perhaps the trout would eat more given a larger space or some companions to compete against. We tested this at Caroline, where the 4th graders poured their trout and any leftover daphnia back into the tank and observed with exclamations "Wow look how fast their eating!" and "That trout must've been really hungry!" 

Newfield trout feeding with DCL pre-COVID!

The 4th graders at Fall Creek had other ideas: "We could use a mirrored box," one student suggested, "that way the trout can't see us, but we can still observe the trout." This student thought maybe having everyone observe the trout made them eat less, no one likes eating with someone staring at them. Other suggestions included trying different food besides daphnia - things like smaller fish, ants, bugs, crushed crayfish, seaweed, or even fish lures - to see if perhaps daphnia just weren't motivating enough to make a good trout feeding experiment. 

All these great observations led to a complex scientific discussion. When we broke down watching the trout eat and how they behaved we came up with that we knew the trout would eat daphnia, but not WHY or WHEN or HOW QUICKLY. Through these observations we were able to conclude that our trout should be able to hunt and find food when released into a stream environment, but not all would survive the same and some might struggle to meet their basic needs after growing up in captivity.

The World's Forgotten Fishes

DID YOU KNOW that over half of all fish species live in freshwater? 

According to "The World's Forgotten Fishes", a new report by the World Wildlife Foundation, "Freshwater biodiversity is declining at twice the rate of that in our oceans or forests. Indeed, 80 species of freshwater fish have already been declared ‘Extinct’ by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, including 16 in 2020 alone. Meanwhile, populations of migratory freshwater fish have fallen by 76 per cent since 1970 and mega-fish by a catastrophic 94 per cent."

Here in the Finger Lakes, we are not seeing many threatened species of fish, or extinctions.  That's good.  But, we don't even depend on our freshwater fish as a commercial food supply.  It turns out however, that around the world, freshwater fisheries provide the main source of protein for 200 million people across Asia, Africa and South America, as well as jobs and livelihoods for 60 million people. Wow!

To learn more, go to the report home page to fine the full report and an accompanying slide show.

Our live trout food: Daphnia!

 Hi friends,

Daphnia with 2 eggs in its brood sack.

I know many of you saw our post earlier this week about beginning our live feeding experiments with our trout and are curious to know more about this common zooplankton, Daphnia, that we feed our trout. 

Daphnia are a zooplankton, meaning that they are animals (zoo) that live at the water's surface, drifting with the currents (plankton). But daphnia are not just any zooplankton... they can live in incredible conditions! 

Studies show that daphnia can live in slightly salty water like you would find where a stream meets an ocean (estuary) and that they manage small levels of salt just as well as completely freshwater! This is incredible. If a human were stranded on a boat in even mildly salty water, they would not be able to survive drinking it because the salt would just make them thirstier - but daphnia can. 

A healthy daphnia (left) with a daphnia
producing hemoglobin (right). 

And here is something even more incredible: if the water source is not changed for the daphnia and they start to use up all their oxygen, they create the same chemical that we have in our blood (hemoglobin) to bind oxygen - making their oxygen intake much more efficient (and turning them slightly reddish colored). That's crazy! Think if you were trapped in your classroom without an air supply and everyone breathing up all the oxygen, pretty soon you would feel super lightheaded, but daphnia have a mechanism to be able to survive days longer in an environment without a lot of oxygen.

If you think that is cool, just wait until you get to watch a trout chase a daphnia around a glass in our feeding experiments. We will have videos and more results of our live feedings coming by the end of next week, stay tuned!

You can check out more about daphnia through our worksheet and a slideshow shared by our teacher program on the teachers' tab of this blog. 

First Live Food Experiment!

Our young trout have grown to a size of about 2 or 3 centimeters.  Are they ready to hunt and eat living prey?  At this point in the year, classes are ready to conduct their first "live food" feeding experiments, using a common zooplankton, called "Daphnia".  

First, students have a chance to practice observation skills, as they get to know the "costar" of this experiment.  Daphnia are about the size of a sesame seed. 

Then, student research teams prepare their hypotheses and perform an experiment to see how their trout will respond to an opportunity to try a new food... that just might try to escape!  Usually, our staff is on hand to lead this experiment (we love it!) but we'll be assisting virtually this year!  Here's a quick glimpse into how it goes...

Finally, students evaluate their results and compare with other research teams.  Here is a typical chart that depicts how many daphnia are eaten by trout during 20 second intervals over five minutes.

Interesting...  for more on this lesson and teaching materials, click on the "For Teachers" tab!