Friday, June 12, 2009
High school students raise trout through national program
Ray Cox covers recreational, high school and college sports in the New River Valley. If you have information you’d like featured,
e-mail ray.cox@roanoke.com or call 381-1672
Ray Cox
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From watery birth to eternal fishy reward, trout face a perilous existence.
As little bitty ones, they serve as hors d'oeuvres for everything from raccoons to adult members of their own cannibalistic salmonid species, particularly the meat eaters of the brown trout family.
As adults, if the trout are so blessed as to negotiate the countless perils and make it that far, challenges include long-billed wading birds such as herons, assorted birds of prey, a variety of furry mammals, men offering worm-clothed hooks and big juicy hunks of multicolored Power Bait, warming water and pollution of all sorts.
Any one of the aforementioned meetings with deadly destiny and a host of others is most often fatal to the trout.
Thus, raising trout from eggs is as risky as any kind of farming. Just as with a crop of radishes, raising trout is a lunker leap of faith.
So it was with high hopes and possibly not a little high anxiety that members of Gary Bobbitt's science class at Floyd County High School overturned water coolers full of upward of 100 fingerling browns into the higher than usual waters of Burkes Fork recently.
The fish, which had been raised from eggs procured from the state hatchery at Wytheville and brought to their majority in a classroom at the high school, took a few moments to get their bearings.
"You could see them all huddled over a sand mound in the creek," said Angelo Biviano, who represented the New River Valley chapter of Trout Unlimited at this cold water debutante ball. "Then they slowly started to disperse, then they were gone."
An optimist might say that one of these brave young browns might survive in a deep hole somewhere in the creek, held over from year to year, until it becomes old and wily, all dressed up in saffron britches with a shirt of red polka dots and a hook-jawed mug that would make it ferocious to behold to a terrified chub swimming by.
True, it's unlikely. But farmers are optimists and romantics by nature. There is always hope, even for tiny trout dumped into one of the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries put-and-take stocked trout streams.
"The idea isn't so much to see what happens to them after they're released but to teach students through the hands-on experience of raising them," said Biviano, who, along with fellow chapter member Howard Williams, is in charge of the area Trout in the Classroom partnership between Trout Unlimited and area schools.
Joe Williams, a biologist who works in the Blacksburg office of the VDGIF, suggested the location of the release.
"Two reasons," he said. "One, it's already in our put-and-take program. Two, there are already wild brooks, rainbow and browns in there to begin with. I don't think we should to be releasing brown trout into any native trout streams."
Williams and the state department endorse the classroom project.
"I think it's great they're being introduced to things like raising trout and stream ecology at such a young age," he said.
The program is a national one for Trout Unlimited. The New River Valley chapter decided a couple of years back to become a part of it. Money was raised locally for the starter materials for one classroom project and then began the work of recruiting a school in which to initiate a project. Floyd County was one of them. A similar program has been under way at Christiansburg High the past couple of years, Williams said.
At Floyd County, Bobbitt fortunately knew a little something about raising fish and had some of the necessary materials already, said Biviano, who teaches technical writing at Virginia Tech.
The high school teacher's experience was helpful in a number of ways. For example, one hazard was avoided when the pH of the local tap was judged to be a problem and class members were dispatched to a nearby stream for buckets of water of the proper acidity to fill the fish tank.
As you might expect, those students, as well as members of the greater school community, became rather attached to the tiny trout. According to Biviano, folks would stop by in their free time to visit, delighting in the famished little predators rising missilelike to the surface of the water to attack the lunch their handlers had sprinkled out for them, then descending back into the depths.
Any angler who has witnessed a big fish boiling the surface as it rises to a doomed mayfly knows the thrill of such a sight.
Biviano and Howard Williams are now in the hunt for more classes in New River schools that would be interested in such a project. Williams is working specifically with Montgomery County schools. Biviano would like to see the program expand into Giles County, where Trout Unlimited's good deeds have already made an impact. Todd Lowe, the chapter president, has spearheaded an ambitious long-term public-private stream restoration project on Big Stoney Creek near Glen Alton.
The national Trout Unlimited organization has grant money available to initiate similar trout in the classroom projects, Biviano said. One of the roles people from the local chapter intend to serve will be to help interested schools write up the required proposals.
"We want this to be an ongoing project," Biviano said.
Viewers of Saturday morning televised fishing shows are familiar with the disconcerting sight of an angler laying a big smooch on a recently caught fish just before its release. Anybody who one day catches a big old brown in Burkes Fork might find it appropriate to blow a kiss in the direction of nearby Floyd County High.
That fisherman might also consider releasing the trophy to grow some more. The students no doubt would appreciate it.
