LOOK HOW BIG I AM!

This is OSCAR...... the BEAST!!!!!

To all curious about the Nyckel Story...

We have finished writing the rough draft and now we are on the editing process of the Nyckel Story! We do not want to give away anything so instead we will fill you in about the real Nyckel.

Nyckel is thriving in our indoor enviroment. He has a small build and darts around the tank often! :)




We love to hear what you think of Nyckel so please post comments!

Trout, it's what's for........... DINNER??!??!!

On Friday we will be venturing to the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, followed by a wonderful lunch at City Tavern.

We couldn't help ourselves from searching the City Tavern site for the delicious meals that will be in store for us.... and then we found this:

Pan-Seared Brook Trout - $24.95

Pennsylvania brook trout, brown butter, capers, lemon sauce, herbed barley, asparagus & Sauce Béarnaise

Could it be!!?!?!? Our darling fingerlings............ PAN SEARED!!?!?!?!???????

(We'll be ordering the vegetarian dish!)

6th Grade Visits!

Recently 6th Graders have been visiting our Watershed classrooms during 1st period while most of us were at specials. We had been presenting how Watershed is integrated learning, what we learn about, and the opportunities that Watershed can offer them.

The 6th grade seemed to be particularly interested in our stream table aquarium with our Black Nosed Dace and Crayfish. Untill..................... they saw the trout! All the work we have done with our Native State Fish seemed to really inspire them!

We hope to be exciting a whole new generation of aquaculturists interested in Cold Water Conservation.

:)

P.S. We are still searching for Grant opportunities every day - if anyone has any Grant suggestions we would love to hear about them!! We just recently looked into www.greenworks.org

Swim Nyckel Swim!

We recently have been thinking about release dates for our trout.
There are many things we must consider before deciding on a date.
Which stream will we release them at?
Is it close enough?
Is it safe and healthy enviroment?
Are they big and healthy enough?
When do we have time for the 45-60 min. procedure?
What materials do we buy to prepare for the release?
And many more. It's never too early to do reseacrh and be prepared.

The location we will release them will be __________________?

To be continued.......!!!!

(Check out L and M cleaning!)

WARNING! TROUT CONTAMINATION! DANGER!

Tomorrow, we are taking a field trip to Valley Forge. Although we are going for a history lesson there is also an interesting story about their trout that would be worth telling.
The trout in the stream off of the Schuykill, Valley Creek, located close to where Washington camped in 1777, are contaminated. A chemical called polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB's) was introduced into the stream from a tire factory nearby in the 1980's. Because of this the trout are a danger to humans if we eat them. You may still go fishing but there is a strict catch-release policy.
We will make sure to stock our trout to a clean, safe, and uncontaminated area!

Happy Valentines Day!

Today we did a ten gallon water change! After we did that, we removed the sock from the filter with a little dead friend stuck on it. This is the only death in 3 WHOLE weeks! Thanks to Laurens mom for bringing in Valentines water. Without the help of Lauren and her family we would really have had a difficult time keeping them alive and healthy!!!

Over the weekend Mrs. Agner is going to look for "clean and healthy" snails for our algae problem!!!



-gabby

Fry with Parr Marks!

The trout are getting so big! Our little fishies now range from half an inch to a whopping 2 and a half inches! We are beyond happy about their growth spurt and their adorable prutruding bellies! We've noticed that most of our small trout stay in groups in the bottom, and our bigger trout are in groups at the top. The trout group is extatic to anounce that our finned friends are OFFICIALLY "Fry with Parr Marks"

Water Pennies in our Tank!?

Well, we wish we were talking about the ecologically important BMI (that's benthic macro invertabrates). No sir, we are talking about a real................ penny. Abe Lincoln himself.

We thought a penny would be a good size indicator of how much our babies have grown. We held the penny up to the tank glass and tried to snap away. The problem is the fish still look distorted in size because none of them swim directly against the glass. It's difficult to show just how big and fat many of them have become!!!

Mrs. Agner accidentally dropped the penny into the tank when she tried to compare the size from up above. Smooth moves!

Thanks for the Inspiration Lexus!

Here are the winners of the Lexus Eco Challenge: http://www.csrwire.com/News/14454.html

Congratulations to them all! We truely are all stewards of the natural world.

Our team didn't make it but we are stiil extremely proud of the work we did! The good news is that we will continue to update the blog of course! Our mission in all of this was to spread the word about trout and cold water conservation and that's just what we'll continue to do!!!!!!!

Check back later today to see how big our babies have grown!

RECORD BREAKING TEST RESULTS!

Today we had the best chemical test results we have ever had!

Here they are:


Average Temp: 51 degrees fahrenheit

pH: 6.9


Ammonia: .15

Nitrate NO-3: .5ppm

Nitrate NO-2: .25 ppm

Survivor!

Today when we were doing an almost (because of the events we will soon tell you) 5 gallon water change we accidentally sucked up a little trout friend! This does happen quite frequently but it does not usually make a full journey through the syphon to the water bucket before we get it out, well at least not usually alive. When we saw the trout swimming happily around the water bucket we freaked. We could not stick a net through the bucket because there is a bottle neck, we poured out the water into another bucket, where we scooped the trout into the net and into a cup of water. Then we safely brought him (or her) back to the tank. We are sorry there are no pictures of this exciting event but we wanted our baby trout back to his house and within a few minutes that's just where he was!