Making life science 'real'

CTWS program brings hands-on salmon education to elementary classrooms

By ADAM LAPIERRE

News staff writer

Upper-valley students are wrapping up a new series of hands-on lessons in fish biology this quarter thanks to a program introduced to Mid Valley, Parkdale and Pine Grove elementary schools by Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs employees from the Parkdale Fish Hatchery.

As part of a salmon education program CTWS expects to continue annually, four salmon incubators have been in operation throughout the fall at the three schools. Students have watched, studied and documented growing batches of spring chinook salmon eggs for the last few months in incubators made from small refrigerators with glass doors.

The eggs — about 75 in each incubator — have all but hatched now and the fry will be released this month into the West Fork near the Parkdale Hatchery.

“This project has been an excellent, hands-on way to teach about life-cycles,” said Jeanie Dexter-Krieger, whose fifth-grade class at Parkdale has been recording daily temperatures, P.H. levels and observation journals through the project. “I think it’s the kind of lesson that students will really remember. It’s one thing to read and talk about something, and it’s another to actually see it through the process. It makes it real to them.”

To start the series of lessons, CTWS hosted a Salmon Days field day at the Parkdale Hatchery on Red Hill Road. Students toured the hatchery and took part in day’s worth of educational activities relating to local salmon. They even had the opportunity to taste Columbia River salmon cooked over a fire by a tribal member who was on hand to talk about the cultural importance the fish had on the region’s native peoples.

Lindsay Brewer, fisheries field biologist, explained that the program was made possible through an educational grant by CTWS, which is aimed at increasing fisheries knowledge in the basin.

“Programs like this have been going on in the lower valley for a while,” Brewer said. “We wanted to extend that education to classrooms in the upper valley. The field day at the hatchery went really well; it’s such a great place for kids to see and learn about fish in their back yard.”

After the field day introduced the new salmon unit, students had three in-class lessons where they learned about watersheds, salmon anatomy and dissection and tribal culture. And as a continuation of the unit the four incubators were set up and stocked with eggs fresh from the nearby hatchery.

“Even when something went bad, it turned out to be a great learning experience,” Dexter-Kreiger said. She explained that a cooling fan in one of the incubators froze up and stopped working, which increased the temperature of one of the batches of eggs.

“What a lesson that was,” she said. “The kids learned what can happen when something changes in a fish’s environment; like when a stream overheats.”

“Not a big deal,” Brewer said about the eggs that died from overheating. She said a female salmon in the basin usually carries about 2,500 eggs.

Once released in to the West Fork later this month, the young fry will hang out for about year before heading to the ocean in the spring of 2012.