Fish Hatchery Visit

Within the past week the 3rd and 4th grades have made visits to the Cold Spring Harbor Fish Hatchery on Long Island.  While it’s a rather long bus ride to get there, it’s definitely worth the trip.  The hatchery has an amazing display of fish, amphibians, and reptiles, all of which are native to New York.  Students get to spend part of their time simply exploring the different tanks and seeing these creatures up close.

The major focus of the trip this year was for students to learn more about trout.  The first part of the program consists of an introduction by a hatchery staffer and then a short documentary film on the life cycle of a trout.  The film helps students realize how difficult (and unlikely) it is for a trout to survive from egg to adult.  They are introduced to the ideas that circumstance, timing, and natural selection all play a role in survival of a particular animal.  Some trout eggs get swept downstream or eaten by predators.  Newly hatched trout may develop a physical abnormality (like two heads!), and throughout each life phase, the fish faces different predators – from water scorpions to other trout to humans.  The likelihood of a single trout egg surviving to adulthood is only about 3%, which makes our Trout in the Classroom program even more essential for encouraging this native species survival in the future.

After the film, students get to ask all sorts of questions while looking at preserved examples of trout at their different stages of existence.  Then, its’ out to the trout pools, where a staffer demonstrates how the hatchery harvests eggs to be raised. Students learn how to distinguish between male and female trout (hint: look for a hook style jaw on the male vs. a straight jaw on the female).  Eggs are squeezed out of the female into a wet metal bowl.  Then, the milt (sperm) is squeezed out of the male over the eggs to fertilize them.  After a few minutes the eggs are covered cold water to “harden” them and make them more durable to the elements.

It is some of these very eggs that get put into a glass jar and transported back to our school to be raised all winter and spring in the Common Space.  Students will spend time each week recording the survival rate, keeping track of the health of the tank water, and then following the trout as they reach milestones in their life cycle.  One of the most amazing sights to see is an older Bronx New School student stopping by the trout display and engaging a younger student in a conversation about trout and what is happening inside that tank.

The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson

I read this book last spring and was amazed at the interconnections between science and American history throughout it.  The book focuses on the adult life of Joseph Priestley, the British inventor best known for his “discovery” of oxygen.  The first parts of the book document his scientific work, paying close attention to his experiments that allowed him to observe the relationships between plants and animals.  He observed what we now know as transpiration- the process of plants taking in oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide.

If that part of the story wasn’t interesting enough, Johnson spends the second half of the book highlighting Priestley’s connections to and influence upon the founders of the United States.  Priestley emigrates to the colonies because his work is not appreciated in England – he is harrassed and hounded, not only for his scientific beliefs, but his political ones, too.  Even before arriving in America, he had been in close correspondence with Ben Franklin, and over the course of some years, he gains the ear of both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

One of my favorite parts of the book was learning how willing Priestley was to share his findings with others.  In some cases it hurt him scientifically; others took credit for what he had actually done. But more importantly, he saw the benefit of bouncing ideas off others, recognizing that his own knowledge would grow if he interacted and developed his ideas in a social setting.

If you like cool science and American history, this is definitely a book for you.  Plus, it’s written as a narrative, so it is much easier to read and follow along.