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!