By AD CRABLE | Staff WriterTownNews.comPosted: Sunday, May 18, 2014 5:00 am
A dozen Marticville Middle School students are clustered around a bubbling, 55-gallon aquarium in Brad Aungst’s social studies classroom.
Since October, when 270 brook trout eggs were delivered, about 10 seventh- and eighth-graders had nurtured and watched over the tank, making sure the water was clear and cold.
They watched the miracle of eggs turn into tiny, squiggly brook trout. They fed them. And now, today, about 100 of the 1- to 3-inch fingerlings were going to be released into the wild.
The students siphon water chilled to 53.4 degrees into two plastic buckets and start scooping the trout with little dip nets, plastic drinking cups and, when the transfer bogs down, their own hands.
Olivia Hurston, an eighth-grader, says she’s sad to see the little fish go, “but I think they’re going to be happier.”
That prompts this from classmate Zachary Walton: “Olivia, blue herons are going to eat them anyway.”
OK, no Disneyesque denial going on here. The students know the way of the wild involves life and death.
“Could we feed them one last time before they go into the wild?” asks a boy.
“No,” Aungst replies gently, “we want them to be hungry” when they’re released.
This day is a capstone day for another “Trout in the Classroom” program. A partnership between the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission and the Pennsylvania Council of Trout Unlimited, the venture lets students raise trout from eggs in their classroom to introduce them to coldwater resources and their importance to communities.
For the last seven years, the local Donegal Chapter of Trout Unlimited has provided funding for local projects. In 2013 alone, trout were raised at Ephrata High School, Penn Manor High School, Lancaster Mennonite Middle School, Kissel Hill Elementary School and here at Marticville.
“We want to teach the students the importance of clean water and the environment, the habitat fish live in and protection of the habitat,” says Bob Kutz of Donegal Trout Unlimited.
“We’d like to see it in every school district in the county.”
At Marticville, the aquarium, chiller, food and other equipment that cost about $1,000 were paid for by the Lancaster County Conservancy through the Joe Bumsted Memorial Fund.
It was an educational, and sometimes eye-opening, experience for the students.
“For a while, some of them were just blown away at that life cycle to see an egg start out and, all of a sudden, see a fish emerge,” notes Aungst, who heads a fly-tying club at the school.
“I really think they learned a lot about the importance of maintaining high water quality systems to help a species like trout.”
Adds student Hurston, “I actually saw one eat another one a couple months ago. It was hard to watch for me.”
After the trout reach fingerling stage in the various “Trout in the Classroom” projects, they are released into a suitable stream in the local school district, if possible.
At Marticville, that meant hopping into a van and driving for barely a mile to the conservancy’s new Climbers Run Nature Preserve.
The 82-acre property is the former Camp Snyder, run for many years by the Boys and Girls Club of Lancaster and purchased by the conservancy in 2012.
The conservancy is renovating buildings on the property to turn it into a nature education center. The preserve, with three trails, will open to the public in late summer or early fall.
A rugged reach of Climbers Run tumbles over boulders and bedrock and Donegal TU was pleasantly shocked when a survey of the stream turned up a healthy population of wild brook trout.
A not-so-healthy section of the stream through open fields will be restored through an $85,000 project this fall by Donegal TU and the conservancy. Other partners include the national TU organization, PPL, The Nature Conservancy, Exelon and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
“It’s great for an education approach. Restore fish habitat and stream banks,” observes Mike Burcin, the conservancy’s CEO.
The formerly stocked stream is closed now. But when the restoration is complete, plans are to open about 1 mile of Climbers Run to public fishing for wild trout.
Fishing will be under fly-fishing-only and catch-and-release restrictions.
The Marticville students don’t waste much time wading into Climbers Run to release their fish.
They take seriously instructions to spread out the young trout and they drag the heavy buckets over slippery rocks and small waterfalls to find nooks that a trout would favor if it wanted to spot a rising insect or hide from a heron.
Most students are as drenched as the fish by the time they’re done. Their teacher comments he didn’t think they (students) would get so wet, especially when the water temperature is a chilly 49.8 degrees.
It will take about two years for the trout to grow enough that they can reproduce in the stream.
After stocking the last of the fish and drying off somewhat, students again enter the water and turn over rocks in search of the stream’s invertebrates.
That’s because a stream is only as healthy as its aquatic inhabitants. A waterway in which wild trout reproduce should have a diverse supply of certain insects.
And this wooded section of Climbers Run does. The kids find stoneflies, mayflies, caddisflies and cranefly larva. Even some dragonfly nymphs.
The students sample the water temperature — 49.8 degrees — as well as dissolved oxygen, pH and phosphorus levels.
Back in his classroom at the end of the day, Aungst is finding it hard to adjust to a classroom without gurgling water in the background.
“It’s sad to see them go,” he says of the trout raised under his tutelage. “But it’s exciting, too, that hopefully, they will grow and eventually reproduce and help make Climbers Run where there’s a pretty strong trout population that people can enjoy.”