Five MS students are officially Beaver Trout Technicians, spending two recesses a week helping raise trout from eggs to fingerlings. Students applied for the responsibility and MS science teacher, Kim McCabe, is assisting students throughout the project. She’s excited for students to experience work in a real-life lab setting.

I hope the program empowers students to pursue future careers in science while fostering an appreciation for local fauna that can blossom into an environmental ethic as they grow up.

Check back each week to see their progress.

Spring update
The spring trout elective has started! One trout tech will continue on (Ruby Miller) and we have 6 new techs excited to work with animals and learn new science skills! Below is a video of the trout feeding. They are doing great! They have starting accepting larger particles of food and some of them are over an inch long! To get them ready for spring break we are slowly dropping the temperature in the tank throughout the week from 52 to around 43 degrees F. This will drop their metabolism so that they wont need care over the break.

 

Week 6
The BVR trout spent the snow days growing up and shedding their yolk sacs! From here on out, the trout will rely on the techs for nutrition. Check out some scenes from this past week below:

Here they are working hard:

And last but not least, a video of the trout swimming around, without their yolk sacs.

The #BVRtrout were very productive during the snow days: they grew out of their yolk sacs! This means they now rely on the #BVRtroutechs for food.

A video posted by @bcdschool on Feb 11, 2015 at 7:19am PST

Week 5
The trout eggs have hatched! Trout Tech Izzy Ramras ’19 took this photo alevin or sac-fry – the name given to trout for the first 1 to 3 weeks of their lives. During this time, they have yolk sacs that provide nutrition.

Week 4
The Trout Techs take their work to the next level and begin coding an ardunio to read the PH levels, water temps, and more of the trout tank. The eggs should hatch any days now!

Week 3
This week the Trout Techs came up with roles that will rotate so that some of them can be freed up to work of side projects like coding and blogging.

Week 2
The trout started hatching Wednesday, and they should finish hatching by Saturday. Their bodies are transparent and if you look very closely (in person, not in photographs) you can see their miniature backbones. The technicians spent this week learning how to change the water and test its quality. We hope by next week we’ll be able to take some pictures of the trout themselves!

Week 1
The trout arrived at Beaver! Pictured below, Izzy Ramras ’19 helps Dan Marchant – the Hatchery Manager at Roger Reed Salmon Hatcher – transfer the 120 trout eggs to the Beaver tank. The eggs should hatch in about a week.