As you know, our class has been raising young salmon from the eyed egg stage. We successfully raised them from eyed eggs to alevin, only losing 1 egg and no alevin. Sadly though, our salmon have taken a turn for the worse (as I'm sure everyone has heard, as the students have been quite disappointed!). Some ammonia appeared in our water. Ammonia can come from a number of sources and is very difficult to rid of once it has appeared in the water. After MANY water changes, vaccumming out the tank and doing whatever I could to fix the situation, many of our salmon have begun to die. At this point it is looking like our group of fry will not be making it to the release. This is very unfortunate, but we can be thankful that we learned as much as we did from watching them grow and hopefully up until this time, it has been a good experience for the class!
Yesterday, I did a dissection of a salmon for the students. We looked at the different physical adaptations of the salmon and how these adaptations help the salmon to survive in its habitat. We also compared the different parts to the human body parts and talked about why salmon (fish) are so different, based on their needs. The students were very interested and asked lots of questions. At the end, they were invited to carefully touch the different parts of the salmon. We learned about respect and understanding and talked about how the salmon gave his life for science, so we could learn all about adaptations and habitats.
Check out some pictures of our dissection!