• Ideally your tank location will be near a sink and water supply. Sadly, most schools I've visited don't have sinks in the classrooms, so often it's necessary to "truck" water from a custodian's closet. (If you are getting your water from a custodian's closet, be aware that many have faucets set up with soap dispensers. Using water with even a trace of soap in your tank could be disastrous! Talk to your custodian and explain your need for unadulterated water.) Make sure you treat all water going into your tank with NovAqua Plus!
• Try to avoid setting up your tank near a window or other source of bright light. If there's a light fixture overhead, either keep that light turned off or ask your custodian to remove the light bulbs.
• Don't set up your tank under an air output vent. If that's your only choice, ask your custodian if he/she can make sure there's a clean filter installed in or above the vent. We don't want your school's ventilation system constantly blowing dust and other particles onto your tank!

​

Resources for kids of all ages
Last week my post addressed some fairly esoteric questions. Should we try to "restore" nature? What should we make of our ancestors' attempts, many centuries, even millennia ago, to modify species for their own benefit? What is our responsibility if our modern lifestyle is taking an excessive toll on the natural world?

Those questions probably aren't designed for students of all ages. But the beauty of TIC is that it can be highly educationally beneficial to students across the spectrum, from pre-school to 12th grade--and beyond! And, if your curriculum is flexible enough, this is a great time of year for helping your students learn about trout, their anatomy, physiology, habitat, threats, food, etc.

​Here are a few resources/suggestions that you might want to consider, some of which are appropriate for younger students.

Trout Are Made of Trees
Trout Are Made of Trees is a delightful book/story for children four to eight years of age, but I think it might work great for somewhat older students too.

It's well told and illustrated and is available both in paperback and as an e-book. If you click on the image to the right, it will take you to the publisher's Web site for the book.

Here's a link to a Web page full of activities related to the book.

And Project Learning Tree has suggestions (here) on how to connect elements of the book to their curriculum.

Below you'll find a cute shadow-puppet reading and dramatization (on YouTube) of the book done by third graders.

My Healthy Stream
My Healthy Stream is a beautiful, 86-page, small format booklet that could almost serve as Trout in the Classroom's other textbook (after the TIC Manual, of course!). As I tend to do, the image of the cover is a live link that will allow you to download and print the book--for free!

Living in Harmony with Streams
While My Healthy Stream was produced by a Michigan Trout Unlimited group but is quite relevant to our Vermont context, Living in Harmony with Streams is entirely home grown.

Four conservation-minded Vermont groups--The Friends of the Winooski River, the White River Natural Resources Conservation District, the Winooski Natural Resources Conservation District, and the Vermont Rivers Program--realized that there was a great need for printed materials to educate the public about rivers, how they work, and how to take care of them.

Like My Healthy Stream, it's a fabulous resource on numerous important matters related to brooks, streams, and rivers, but its scientific content is pitched at a higher level. It would certainly be great to use with high school students, but some motivated middle schoolers can probably also get a lot out of it. Of course, every TIC teacher would benefit from reading it too!

Click, download, print (optional), and read. You'll be impressed by the wonderful piece of work that these four organizations, in partnership, managed to produce.

Stream Explorers
The national Trout Unlimited staff periodically publish a four-page newsletter called Stream Explorer, which is designed for youth members of TU. These take the form of attractive, high-resolution publications that can be easily downloaded and printed.

Here's an example: the front and back pages of an issue focused on trout habitat, especially in the Adirondacks. (Click on the image to access the Google Drive folder that contains this and other issues.)

​
VTTIC Google Drive curriculum materials
All of the items featured above can also be found in the Google Drive collection I've put together for the Trout in the Classroom program; so, if you lose track of them, you can always find those resources again in that collection. Clicking on the image below will get you to that folder. (Notice the Stowe unit and the materials from a Keene, NH, teacher, by the way.) If you don't want to hunt for this particular blog post, you can always get back to this folder and others by going to the VTTIC Web page <vermonttroutintheclassroom.weebly.com>, clicking on the TIC RESOURCES button and then clicking the TIC GOOGLE DOCS COLLECTION button.

National TIC Web site
There are a great many valuable resources available on the TU national's TIC Web site. Take a look especially at Lesson Plan Ideas, Web Resources, and A Library List. (Those links are not active on the page below, but if you click on the image, you'll be taken to the real "Teachers" page of the TIC Web site, and you will be able to access them from there.)

​If you try some of these resources and curriculum materials, let me know what you think of them.

Finally, a caution!
I got an e-mail from a southwestern Vermont teacher about a week ago. She reported that, without realizing it, she had used a soapy sponge to clean a dirty area of her tank and now had soap everywhere. She wanted to know what to do. I advised her to use treated water to rinse and dry all soapy surfaces repeatedly.

The lesson here is always make sure you're using a clean sponge--ideally, a new one--or at least one that has never been used except in your tank and certainly never been used with soap or any cleaning substance.
​
Sponges are inexpensive. Our little trout are priceless!

History of Fish and Wildlife (also "fish and wildlife") in Vermont
After our brief but interesting discussion about "ethical issues" associated with the TIC program, I decided to look for documents and reports that could inform us about the dramatic changes that humans made to the Vermont landscape and to the rivers and watersheds that our trout need for their existence.

One helpful document was a "timeline" I found on the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife's Web site (image of first page below is a link to the full PDF).

In this document, you'll learn such interesting tidbits as:

• when the Legislature put a bounty on killing mountain lions
• when the last beaver was trapped (before their reintroduction)
• how much the first resident hunting license cost

But looking at these details regarding the natural history of Vermont and the evolution of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department raises some questions:

1. Why do we have a F&W Department?
2. How is Vermont F&W financed?
3. Does/should the funding source influence the priorities of the Department?

​
I think most would agree that the creation of Vermont's and other state's "fish and wildlife" department was a response to the dramatic decline of fish and wildlife populations across the country. What caused that?

How did we devastate Vermont's land, especially during the 19th Century?
​

• Clear cutting for farms, timber, potash, sheep

What led people to do this damage?

• selfishness
• shortsightedness
• philosophical and religious beliefs

The first two are human traits, many would say human failings, but the third requires some explanation. 

Manifest Destiny was an ideology and political point of view that emerged in the United States in the first half of the 19th Century. It had a great influence on how the nation saw itself; how it expanded, both in North America and elsewhere; and--for the purpose of this narrative--how it treated the land and the living things that occupied it.

According to historian William Weeks, those who advocated Manifest Destiny  usually drew on three main themes:

• the virtue of the American people and their institutions (sometimes described as "American exceptionalism")
• the mission to spread these institutions, thereby redeeming and remaking the world in the image of the United States
• the destiny under God to do this work.

It was Manifest Destiny that justified expanding the American population across the continent, even when it meant taking land from other countries or dispossessing Native Americans of their ancestral homelands.

It was also that sense of superiority, including over "nature," and that it's all "ours for the taking" that led to wiping the passenger pigeon from the skies and driving the American bison into near-extinction.

Alternatively: the Native American view
But consider Native American cultures. The whole Manifest Destiny approach that the European-Americans used to justify "owning," "controlling," and destroying the land and its species stands in stark contrast to the way Native Americans viewed and treated the natural world.

One of the most popular expressions of the Native American's views of nature can be found in the 1854 speech of Chief Seattle. Here's an excerpt from it: (I should add that whether Seattle's words, spoken in his native tongue Lushootseed, were interpreted accurately is oft disputed.)

Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch.

Triploids
As I think everyone involved in this program knows, all of the brook trout eggs we get these days are "triploids," that is sterile fish.

The reason behind the state's shift to triploids two years ago was to prevent the fry we release in Vermont's waters from inter-breading with native fish that might be living in those streams. That way we can preserve whatever "heritage strains" might exist. And even if no heritage strains exist in the streams where we release our TIC fish, at least our trout aren't modifying the genetics of fish that are successfully reproducing and "making it" on their own. 

​When you see the process that Jeremy Whalen, supervisor of the Roxbury Fish Culture Station, describes as the way triploids are created (photo below), it may make you think about Dr. Victor Frankenstein.

But humans have been "messing with nature" for a long time. At our TIC workshop, Robb Cramer pointed out that bananas and seedless watermelons are triploids. So are some awfully good apples: Jonagold, Mutsus, and Winesaps, among many others.

But the "messing with nature" tradition goes much deeper than Luther Burbank or even Gregor Mendel. For millennia, humans have been modifying species for agriculture and herding. Most believe that agriculture began in the Fertile Crescent around 10,000 to 12,000 BC. That involved selectively harvesting seeds from specimens that had desirable traits--bigger wheat grains, for example--and doing that again and again and again over centuries. Wheat, rice, corn, potatoes, quinoa, lettuce, peas, broccoli, every fruit, almost all nuts and seeds--it's pretty much all the result of selective breeding if not even more invasive procedures.

About 2,000 years later, humans started to do the same thing to animal species, beginning with goats and chickens.

Over time, through this process of "selective breeding," species changed. Chickens that used to weigh two pounds now can weigh as much as 17 pounds. Birds that laid a small number of eggs once a year now can produce 200 or more. And wolves became house pets, that is to say, dogs. (And the dogs keep changing! Who invented that cute Labradoodle?)

As we approach Thanksgiving time, think about what's happened to the bird at the center of the typical American holiday table. I'm pretty sure you and your family have eaten a domestic turkey. Have you ever had a wild turkey? They're pretty different, aren't they. That's the result of selective breeding--and lots of other human interventions.

And many say that, if it hadn't been for the development of agriculture, we wouldn't have anything like the "civilization" we see around the World today. Over time, our ancestors became increasingly more efficient in growing food; and that allowed some members of the community to move into specialized roles, including shamans, warriors, scribes, artists, poets, and philosophers. 

But selective breeding is just the beginning. As our understanding of plants and animals grew, we found new ways to "mess with Mother Nature."

Ask your local dairy farmer  how important artificial insemination is. And what about genetic engineering? I'm told that it's hard to shop at the typical grocery store without encountering GMOs at every turn. (Not so in Europe, apparently.)

Hatcheries and aquaculture
Which brings us back to Trout in the Classroom, a program based on harvesting eggs from hatchery-raised female trout, fertilizing those eggs with milt collected from hatchery-resident male trout, and then in less than two months, delivering those "eyed" eggs to your TIC schools.

While many fisher-people applaud the hatchery trucks that arrive to stock their home waters, not everyone feels the same. Here's an alternative view.

The Patagonia company has produced and made available for free a full-length documentary on the issues associated with fish farming--in this case for the purpose of raising salmon--as well as our over-dependence on hatcheries. 

It's a well produced and informative film that might change the way you regard hatcheries and fish stocking. It could also influence the way you shop for fish!

Let me know what you think of Artifishal. I'd be interested, too. in hearing what grade levels you think are ready for this complex and controversial content.

Here's the full-length (1' 15") film.

2019 TIC workshop
Last Saturday, forty TIC fans gathered in the Red Schoolhouse on the Vermont Tech Randolph campus for the 6th annual (!) workshop for TIC teachers and volunteers.

We were fortunate to have dry weather after a 24-hour period that brought much wind and rain and even a fair bit of flooding.
​

Tiffany Tucker, who teaches 1st grade at Springfield, Vermont's, Elm Hill School, was one of the experienced teachers on the teacher panel that took place at 1:30 pm during our workshop. Along with sharing information about several of the "TIC enhancements" that Tiffany has added to her program, she brought a 6-minute video that provided a visual summary of some of the Elm Hill School TIC highlights.

Here's that video.

As we have done most years, we ended the workshop by pulling raffle tickets for "door prizes." The final drawing was restricted to the experienced TIC teachers as a way of recognizing the particularly important contribution they make to the workshop each year. This year's winner was Noah Hoffman, 7th grade science teacher at Mt. Abraham Union Middle School. Three days later, Noah sent me this photo of him "breaking in" the attractive brook trout glass he won in that raffle.

Ethical issues and TIC
During last week's TIC workshop, Cindy Mosedale, math and science teacher at Newark Street School, and others raised questions about some ethical issues that they perceive or can imagine some of their students and parents perceiving related to the Trout in the Classroom program. Some of these may have to do with the fact that now all the eggs we receive and fish we raise (and release) are sterile "triploids."

We began to explore those issues but didn't have time to get into them in much depth. I have asked Cindy to send me a brief statement in which she articulates her concerns. In the next blog or two, I'll hope to begin to dive into these issues, which could be raised by your students or their parents.

​Finding redds
​A couple of weeks ago, I forwarded an e-mail about a redd counting project that was about to take place in southwestern Vermont.

Janni Jacobs, of Braintree Elementary School, which sits just east of the White River and even closer to Flint Brook, one of the White's tributaries, let Rudi Ruddell know that she was interested in getting her students involved in finding redds in their "home waters."

What's a redd? A redd is a nest created in the gravel of a stream by a female trout that's ready to spawn. Finding and counting redds is a great project to undertake at this time of year if you and your kids have the opportunity to walk in or alongside a stream that holds brook or brown trout (rainbows spawn in early spring).

Since learning of Janni's interest, I've added four YouTube videos about redds to the Other Trout Videos page accessible from the VTTIC home page.

The first two videos on that page also contain terrific underwater footage of female trout making a redd and then laying her eggs in it (and lots of other great footage).

This (below), the first of the four redd videos, provides a good introduction to the topic as well as instructions on how to perform a redd count.

Let me know if you get out there with your kids to look for redds--and send me photos.

Getting set up
As most teachers know, the TIC timeline calls for ordering your equipment and supplies and setting up your tank before Thanksgiving. That's not too far in the future, so I hope you're working on that intensively right now!

Here's a link to a Google Docs folder (on the VTTIC Web site) that contains lists of equipment and supplies you'll need, whether you're a new or experienced TIC teacher.

Here's a link to a Word document (available in the same folder) that contains links to six YouTube videos that demonstrate tank and equipment set-up.

If you need help figuring out how most efficiently to cut a single 4' X 8' sheet of 1" insulating foam to cover your tank on all six sides, take a look at the instructions developed by the Great Bob Wible here.

Similarly, if you haven't already modified your breeder basket by replacing the too-fine bottom screening by something coarser (and by putting the netting inside the basket frame instead of outside it), check out these instructions from Bob.

Unless you've decided not to pre-cycle, don't forget to order your ammonium chloride.