It has been wonderful to hear from so many of you through personal e-mails about your classes’ successes and failures. We have a wide variety of backgrounds in our teachers, some with much tank experience and others with very little. Many of you have taught me about such important areas as ammonia and chloramides. It appears that mortality rates have varied greatly throughout the state. Some tanks have hundreds of fry while others are down to 50 or less. We had two schools lose all fry, one due to a chiller malfunction and the other to water quality issues. Both schools will be re-supplied with fry to get them back on track. By the way, I now have the back-up chiller should any of you need to use it while yours is repaired. Let’s hope we’re done with the breakdowns for this year!
One concern I have for some tanks is the relatively high ammonia levels. In those situations, please change your water more frequently and make very sure you don’t have dead or decaying fish left in the tank (check filters, intake lines, under rocks, etc.) or uneaten fish food that is driving up the ammonia levels. Also, adding gravel or small stones from a local river will aid the bacteria in colonizing which will help attack the ammonia problem. I’m not yet sure what effect, if any, the 5 schools without UV Sterilizers are experiencing without that equipment (?). I remain confident that the students are enjoying their experiences and so too, are the teachers. I thank each of you who have shown great patience in our volunteers, mainly yours truly, as we gather the experience we’ll need for adding future TIC classes.