Cycle of life stars trout

EXETER – To the right as you walk into the classroom, are flesh-eating beetles. Don’t worry, they only eat rotting flesh. In the back, that’s a coyote tail on one side and a bear skin on the other, a nuisance bear shot in Canada. In between them, though, that’s the big news, the real eye-catcher, the 150-gallon aquarium housing scores of tiny trout.

Well, housed scores until a few weeks ago. Now there are only six, thanks to a massive fish kill that teacher Damien Rutkoski can’t explain. The project started out with 75 freshly hatched fry – “They had just shed their egg sacks,” Rutkoski noted – and thanks to careful management of the stock only 10 were lost during the critical first 30 days of growth.

Yet when Rutkoski returned recently from a one-day vacation, he found them floating by the dozens. By the time the mysterious deaths were over, he only had these six.

Still, the Wyoming Area Secondary Center biology teacher dubbed the “Trout in the Classroom” program a huge success and he intends to try again next year with a fresh batch of eggs and a tighter monitoring program, probably including a security casing around the aquarium. And why not? It was a hit with the students, supported by the administrators, and tied in tightly with material that had to be taught anyway.

And it was free, sponsored jointly by the state Fish and Boat Commission and the Stanley Cooper Sr. Chapter of Trout Unlimited, a national conservation group.

“It’s about giving the kids the opportunity to see the fish develop from egg to adult,” said Mike Romanowski, Stanley Cooper Chapter president and a math teacher at the high school.

That opportunity was shared by about 130 students in Rutkoski’s class, beginning with the preparation of the tank Dec. 21 (he kept a science journal with scrupulous detail) and the Jan 4 arrival of the fry – a glitch had caused a slight delay until after the eggs had hatched.

The first order of business was to acclimate the fish, driven from a Penn State University hatchery while stored in plastic bags in a cooler. The water in the bags had warmed above the 51.6-degree optimum in the tank, so they carefully lowered the bag temperature by adding 118.28 milliliters of cooler water every 10 minutes.

“It took over 3/1/2 hours to be able to put them in the tank,” Rutkoski said.

Students helped change the water (20 percent every week), added bacteria that thrived on the ammonia in the fish excrement to keep the water from getting toxic, monitored the acidity and other factors critical to fish survival, and fed them. That last one is when you really get to see the fish instincts kick in, Rutkoski said with a smile.

Non-trout types may be surprised to learn it, but these water dwellers establish supremacy just as chickens make a pecking order or dog packs get topped by an alpha-male. In this case, a handful of the fry quickly cleared out one side of the tank near the surface, forcing smaller fish into denser clusters.

Why dominate one particular part of the tank? Rutkoski said the water is circulated to resemble a stream, with currents at different speeds and different levels. The alpha-trout may have picked a place where the food was easier to nab and the swimming less energetic.

Only one of the dominant trout survives, but he still holds the same high water space.

“He’s a shark,” student Nick Talamelli quipped. Talamelli, incidentally, nabbed three trout during opening weekend of trout season.

Technically, no one knows the gender of the fish yet, but Mark Serafin was confident about the aggressive alpha. “He’s a man, I’ll tell you that.”

The trout grow about an inch a month, Rutkoski said, and the remaining fish are approaching three inches in length. They will be released in Bowman’s Creek in May, and although this is primarily a program for the students, it’s also an experiment for the state.

“When you have captive trout they look very different,” Rutkoski said, because they scrape their fins and stomachs against the concrete growing tanks. “They taste different, too.”

The state wants to see if it’s feasible to release the trout as fingerlings, after a year or less of growth, rather than waiting up to three years for them to reach adult size.

Rutkoski promises to have trout in the classroom again next year, and hopes to expand the project. The chiller that keeps the aquarium water at creek-cool temperatures could handle one or two small side tanks where conditions could be altered slightly – making water a little warmer or more acidic, for example –to watch the impact on the fish. With growing classroom emphasis on state test results and tighter state control on what schools must teach, it’s hard to find a program that can be justified as meeting state standards, Rutkoski said. This one does.

“We were able to test ecosystems, temperature, water cycle, it’s a perfect program.”

Besides, watching fish grow adds a balance to a class where the students also get to watch dead things decay.

Remember those flesh-eating beetles? They’re used to clean off animal skulls that are mounted and either displayed in the classroom or donated to programs outside the school.

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