The Great Egg Race! Unusual early developments and more.

Joe's 4Runner after a day delivering eggs.

Whew!!
Hundreds of miles and dozens of volunteers later, before kids left school on Friday, January 6, most of Vermont's TIC schools had their eggs. In southwest Vermont alone, eight of us delivered 3,150 eggs to 17 classrooms. It was great fun!

Here are some pictures of that day (but I hope I can add more shortly. Send them in).

Egg origin story
Here are some facts about the eggs you received:

1. They are the Rome strain.
2. They came from the Roxbury Fish Culture Station, which was built in 1891 and is the second-oldest hatchery in the country.
3. The eggs were produced by female "brood stock" trout that were resident at the Salisbury Fish Culture Station. Eggs were then fertilized with "milt" from male brood stock trout, also resident at Salisbury. Once fertilized, the eggs were transferred to Roxbury. Here's a link to a YouTube video about fertilizing brook trout eggs at a Pennsylvania hatchery.
4. Before being given to us, the eggs had been treated with a mild iodine bath to reduce the likelihood of infection.
5. The water at the hatchery was 44.2 degrees on Friday.
6. The Development Index (DI) of the eggs on Friday was 40.96. That will increase every day they're in water over 32 degrees. (It was 39.37 on Wednesday, when some eggs were picked up.)
7. When we picked up the eggs, the hatchery still had approximately 150,000 eggs left. They had started the season with 325,000 eggs but previously shipped out 175K. They also had approximately 30,000 rainbow trout in three long concrete raceways.

(Below on the left is a photo of the Roxbury Fish Culture Station. The Salisbury hatchery is on the right.)

Weird eggs, early hatching, and fungus 
In one early report relayed by Addison County TIC volunteer Doug Zehner, Melissa Muzzy, of Vergennes Union HS, wondered whether this photo was of a set of Siamese twins.

I'm not sure, but when I zoomed in on the conjoined pair of eggs, I though it looked like it might be two fairly normal eggs connected by fungus.

Lisa Marks, of Ludlow ES, had what may have been the first hatchling of 2017. Here is a picture of her new baby. See the tail poking out in the center of the picture?

By the way, whenever an egg hatches, the shell is left behind. This should be removed using a pippette or turkey baster.

---

When Bob Wible asked Jeremy about such an early hatch, here's what Jeremy said:
An egg hatching at 40-41 DI is not uncommon. You will see some early hatching. When the DI hits 58, we would expect 100% to be hatched, but some will start hatching much sooner than that.

Along with looking for and removing dead eggs, you should also vigilant about fungus. When I delivered eggs to Fair Haven Grade School on Friday, it appeared to me that four eggs had little patches of fungus on them. I told teacher Amy Wright that I didn't think these had to be removed immediately, but I suggested that she monitor those eggs. Should the fungus grow or spread, then the eggs should be removed.

Keep track of data!
At this point in the TIC cycle, you or your students should be entering data into two spreadsheets every day:

• the "Record of temperature and DIs and swim-up calculator" and
• the "Template for TIC data entry"

You'll no longer need to use the first of these  once your fry are feeding, but the second should be used right up to Release Day.

Web site statistics
This past week, our Web site received its most traffic ever. Here's a chart of the "pageviews" for the week. (These were generated by 114 unique visitors.)