SWVTTU egg deliveries On Tuesday, nine volunteers delivered over 2,200 brook trout eggs to 21 southwest Vermont schools. Four other SWVT schools will get their eggs at a later date. When we arrived at many schools, people--from the principal to the school secretary to the maintenance guy--were excitedly waiting for us. Free teacher workshop Colleen Hickey, Education and Outreach Coordinator for the Lake Champlain Basin Program, recently asked me to let you know about a special opportunity that will take place later this month. As part of LCBP's celebration of the Year of the Salmon, they will hold a free workshop for teachers on Saturday, January 25. The following topics will be addressed:
To learn more about the Year of the Salmon, click here. Early hatchers. As I said in my last blog post, while it's early for trout eggs to be hatching, some undoubtedly will hatch way before the normal time. In fact, Lisa Marks and her students at Ludlow Elementary School discovered a hatchling among the eggs that had been delivered to their classroom. (I guess it was born during the car drive from the hatchery.) Here are a couple of pictures of the first egg to hatch at LES. You might consider getting your students to keep track of the days on which eggs hatch and have them turn that into a chart. Instead or in addition, you could have them graph hatching as a function of Cumulative DI. Active eggs/alevin at Orwell! Liz Volpe, new TIC teacher at Orwell Village School, sent me this video on Thursday. When those embryos are trying to hatch, they sure get active!! Photos from Riverside Middle School in Springfield. New TIC teacher Joseph Frigo sent me a couple of photos, one of his neat tank setup and one of his eggs in their breeder basket. Academy School report Sarah Kaltenbaugh, of Academy School, provided this report on her school's egg delivery experience: Hey Joe! My sixth graders were thrilled to have Paul drop off the trout eggs last week. I'm not sure that he was ready for such eager, curious kids, but he handled them brilliantly. They love being the class scientist for the day and testing the water and reading the thermometer (which has a scale of 2, so it is great practice for our Number Systems unit). And a couple of photos. BFA-Fairfax contributes Melinda Carpenter, 6th grade science teacher at BFA-Fairfax sent these three photos. Do some of those aberrant eggs look like any of yours? Learn about macros with DEC scientists! One of our loyal TU/TIC volunteers, Kathy Ehlers, often brings items to my attention that she finds on Facebook. One such item related to an opportunity to help Department of Environmental Conservation staff classify and count benthic macroinvertebrates as a way to gauge the health of a stream or other body of water. After some sleuthing, I tracked down this operation to a "bio assessment lab" that DEC has setup on the VTC campus in Randolph. Until the end of February, DEC's lab will be analyzing benthic macroinvertebrate specimens that their staff collected last summer as part of their efforts to monitor the quality of Vermont's streams and other bodies of water. I was pleased to learn that the department welcomes the contributions of aspiring "citizen scientists." This could include TIC teachers and volunteers who'd like to learn more about "macros," as they're called. The lab is also willing to train high school students (not those in lower grades) to help with this important project. Unfortunately, because the lab is small, the staff can't accommodate more than a few people at a time. If you'd like to sign up for a shift assisting the staff in their water quality assessment work, contact Michelle Graziosi either by e-mail ([email protected]) or by phone (802-490-6145). Michelle is an environmental technician with the Monitoring and Assessment Program of the Watershed Management Division at DEC. Here's a brief video in which she introduces herself and her work. Fish Health Laboratory In one of the several phone calls I made while trying to find people who worked at the bio-assessment lab, I learned that DEC also runs a fish health laboratory, which is also housed at VTC in Randolph. It turns out that you can arrange to visit the fish health lab and request a tour. Contact Rebecca Harvey, Director, Vermont Agriculture and Environmental Laboratory, 802-585-6073, or at [email protected]. Data sheets This past week, with major help from White River Partnership's Rudi Ruddell, I sent out two e-mails with links to two Google Sheets, one of which is to be used for tracking/predicting/controlling when swim-up occurs. This is extremely important as it is at the swim-up stage that in previous years TIC classrooms have experienced the highest mortality rates. The second e-mail transmitted the spreadsheet that we hope all TIC teachers will use to record the following data:
If all our TIC classrooms can keep and share good data, we will be able to improve our practice every year.
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Joe Mark is Lead Facilitator of Vermont's Trout in the Classroom program.In June 2012, I retired after 40 years in higher education, having spent the last 32 years of my career as dean at Castleton. One of the first things I volunteered to do in retirement was to work with a parent-friend to help the Dorset School, where his kids and my Vermont grandkids attend, start a TIC program. Gradually that commitment grew into my current role, which is both demanding and highly rewarding. Archives
December 2019
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