Hydroponics in our Aquarium

Miss Coffey here from Caroline Elementary School... We're currently on spring break, but that doesn't stop me from working or taking care of our trout!!! Yesterday I went into school for awhile to get some stuff done. As I fed the excited fish, I saw that our hydroponics experiment was working! The grass floating on the top of the tank is growing!
(Click the picture to see a closer view)

Over at Caroline Elementary...

Out trout are getting SO big!!! And they're always hungry! We did a little experiment yesterday with all of the worms resurfacing outside on that wet day and dangled some over our trout aquarium. We were laughing as they actually leapt out of the water to get them!

Join Us At Ithaca Fishing Day - Saturday March 20! (Click on image to enlarge!)

Groton

Today Bill was in to do this month's brown trout lesson. The above shows a food chain. We have a sample of algae on the right and one of the brown trout on the left. In the middle we are missing an important link in the chain that eats the algae but acts as a food source for trout; the Daphnia, or "water flea." We fed daphnia to our trout to see if they would recognize it as a food source because up until now they have just been feeding on fish food. We concluded that these fish instinctually fed on these prey even though they had never encountered them before.
Curtis observes his hungry brown trout.

Hungry Browns

Our trout have amazing appetites! We are feeding them about 5 times a day to help discourage them from "going cannibal". Here is video we took at the surface during feeding time.

GONE CANNIBAL!

So far, trout at most of our schools are achieving a 75%-80% survival rate, but a new facter has arisen. Students at Newfield, Lansing and Northeast have witnessed.... CANNIBALISM!

While a number of schools have reported seeing trout par with tails sticking out of their mouths, no one has actually witnessed cannibalism as it happens. Are these trout stalking healthy neighbors, or are they removing sick/dying fish? More observations are needed!

Caroline

Today Bill Foster and a helper, Colleen, came to Caroline and led us in an experiment with our ever-growing hungry little trout! So far we've been feeding our trout three times a day this dry, crumbly, non-living fish food. But does that happen in nature? Do we go to streams and lakes and dump in enough fish food for all of the things living in it? NO! Our trout don't have parents to help teach them what to do in nature, so we took several trout out of the aquarium, put them in beakers, and dumped in some living Daphnia. The tiny Daphnia swam around and we wanted to see if our trout would have the instinct (a natural or intuitive way of acting or thinking) to eat the Daphnia or not.

Cool picture of Daphnia in the shadows:


Watch what happened:

Picturing Writing

These are some of the activities we have been working on. These first paintings are of the habitat trout are know to dwell (rivers and lakes) and then we will begin to paint and write about each life cycle stage of the trout. Hopefully, we will have a completed book at the end of the year.

Enfield Trout

Happy New Year! Our trout have been doing wonderfully. Everything has been functioning properly with good reading from the water tests. So far we've only lost 8 fish. Considering we lost about 85% of our fish at this time last year, our mortality rate is superb. One contributing factor that might be indicative our survival rate is that I placed the ammonia chips into the filter before the fish arrived as opposed to last year when I put the chips in during January. Check out our other blog to see what our class has been up to. Mr. Brooks' class

Caroline

Our trout are doing great. Yesterday we got rid of the basket and led the last lingering ones out into the "big sea." We've lost about 20 fish so we're thinking about 80 remain swimming around our newly-decorated tank.