Gill St. Bernard’s School has an easy estimate of about 200 survivors as of February 25! They are growing in size, and we can only assume that there is occasional cannibalism going on, since we never seem to find any dead, and some are growing bigger than others. Water quality has only been an issue in terms of keeping the pH constant. Our main benefit though has been that the water we are using is water we hauled up in buckets and containers from the trout stream that runs through our campus. We did a water change in late December just before our holiday break, and plan to do another one in about a week, just prior to our spring break. Filter changes are more frequent lately, and the chiller vents are cleaned out periodically as well (as the dust tends to accumulate in there!). Some other differences in our tank might be as follows: the rocks at the bottom are also stream rocks, and we have 2 filters running at all times. Our initial filter was broken upon delivery, and so I used another one that had come with the tank. When a replacement arrived, we continued to keep both filters operating together.
Surviving and Thriving!
Monday, February 26th, 2007
3 Responses to “Surviving and Thriving!”
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Brian Cowden said:
February 26th, 2007 at 10:03 am
Extra filtration is certainly a benefit! I have been in contact with NY, CT and PA’s Trout in the Classroom programs and our four states plan to get together over the summer months to discuss best practices to streamline our program even further. Ammonia spikes and a lack of proper bacteria remain our biggest issues by far. Various methods are being used by students and teachers with varying success, but there do not seem to be any “magic bullet” remedies. It seems for each school that has success in water quality with a certain method, there is another school doing something very different, but also meeting with success.
Right now, all tanks seem to be stable. One issue I’ve seen and heard from some of you about is the stockings that were placed over the filter/chiller pump intake lines. Some of you are using stockings that are not porous enough and that is reducing the filter’s ability to clean the water. Next year, I recommend we all use fiberglass window screen material instead. You may wish to remove the stockings at this point since your fish are all likely strong enough to avoid the intakes and it will help to filter your water more efficiently.
Taryn Romanczak said:
March 1st, 2007 at 11:27 am
Hunterdon County Polytech has about 125 fish still surviving and growing rapidly! We did have problems with the pH in the beginning of the year, for some reason, the pH was about 7.6 in the tank, where the water coming from the tap was neutral. We couldn’t figure out what was going on, so we just focused on keeping the pH in the tank constant and that hasn’t been a problem. As far as filtration, we added another filter about a month ago, as our fish were growing so rapidly and eating and eliminating more. We also added several more air stones to increase oxygenation. My students perform water changes everyday (5-6 gallons)! My students think there is a small degree of canabalism going on, as for a while there were fish that were SIGNIFICANTLY smaller than the others, but size gap has shrunk dramatically, but not the numbers. SO- either some fish have hit a growth spurt, or there are a few that are getting eaten.
Brian Cowden said:
March 1st, 2007 at 11:46 am
Taryn,
Great advice on additional filtering and additional oxygenators. We (TIC state coordinators and TU chapter coordinators) plan a meeting between NJ, PA, NY and CT later this spring or over the summer to talk about improvements to the program, especially in the area of equipment and water quality. I do believe a second air stone is a minimum addition and either more or stronger filtration will also help. Of course, we always try to keep the costs down so TIC is affordable to new schools, but we see numerous teachers/schools updgrade their equipment as time goes on.