Returning our Salmon Fry

Since school got back in after the winter break we have taken very good care of our salmon eggs.  We watched them turn from eggs to alevin, then from alevin to fry.  If you didn't know salmon grow based on the accumulated temperature of the water they are in and at certain temperatures they change.  While our water was cold, it was actually warmer than other people's water and so our salmon grew much more quickly than we expected.  Because of this, we had grown fry before spring break.  This led to a little problem because we had no one at school to feed them over the school holiday.  So, yesterday we returned our fry to the hatchery that we received them from.

Ms. Lirenman took some photos of the process.

First all the fry were happily swimming around our tank.

Then Ms. Lirenman syphoned one bucket of water out of the tank.

Next,  she scooped out all the fry and put them in the big blue bucket.

Next Ms. Lirenman took them to her car and drove them to Tynehead  Hatchery.

Ms. Lirenman drove to Tynhead Hatchery

Tynhead Hatchery is run by volunteers.

The people at the hatchery created a safe spot for our fry in their big tanks and slowly added them into their new home. If you look closely you might even see them in the water.

As you can imagine we miss our salmon children already. Don't worry though in April the entire class is going to travel back to the hatchery. Maybe we'll see our fry then, but if we don't we will meet other fry. In April it will also be a lot warmer for the fry and we will release some back into the wild. 

Throughout this salmon study, we have learned so much about salmon.  We were pretty good adoptive parents too.  In the end, while we started with 55 eggs we lost 5 eggs early on (two eggs even arrived dead), one alevin, and when we were transferring the fry to the blue bucket we found one dead fry too.  In the end, if you do the math, we brought 48 healthy fry back to the hatchery.

If you're curious to learn more about salmon please get a hold of our teacher.  We will share our salmon knowledge with you.