Weekly Blog
Each week one of our Tank Teams will be posting an update on our salmon.
This week our salmon have tried to swim.
Here is the update from our growth data scientists: This week the salmon grew to 2 cm or 20 mm. We noticed the salmon are starting to swim around. The salmon are losing their yolk sac. We have not started to feed them yet. None of them have died yet so we still have 50 fish.
This week we have read a book about salmon called Idaho Chinook Salmon Journey of a Life Cycle.
We saw parr marks, and they swim fast. They also hide behind the sun shelter.
We want our community to know that our salmon are doing very well. For the past two weeks, the water quality was not good but luckily the water quality is doing much better.
We want the community to know about our tank teams! Our water quality team feeds the fish, checks the water quality and uploads the results on the website. The website team, this team puts stuff like the weekly updates on the website. Our creative midea crew makes updates and puts them on the billboard. Last, is our growth tracking team. They check the fish's length and things like that. Those are our fish tank teams.
Growth Team Update📏: This week the salmon are swimming up, and down. Our growth data sheet shows that all is well with our salmon. Our salmon are the same size as they were last week.
By Trinity,
This week no fish have died! Because the water quality has been better, the fish are doing better. This week our community expert Craig Rabe is coming.
Over Spring Break and this week we lost 5 more fish. Because the PH (potential hydrogen) is too high, we lost 5 more fish. We started with 50 fish but now we only have 31. We are trying to find out a way to stop the pH from going to high or low.
Sadly we are down to about twenty fish, so we got special leaves to put in the tank. The ph is not so good this week. We noticed that the ph from the fish tank is the same as the water from the sink. Horazontily they are swimming better.
This week there were no deaths, and the water quality is good. We have all of the numbers where they need to be.
We have noticed that the fish are only swimming on the top left corner of the tank.
This is what water quality told us "This week the PH was good and no fish died, and the ammonia was between 0 and 25 ppm.
Speaking of water quality, the nitrate and nitrite are at 0 ppm."
The data team told us that,"This week not much has happened. We have had no deaths and they are the same size 4 cm. The fish are in the par stage. Fun fact: we are releasing our fish on our camping trip which is on the 27 of may.¨
water quality
This week the water quality was not great. The ammonia was high so it was a bit concerning, but not too high for the fish.
The data scientists told us, "This week our salmon are the same size and are doing well. They are eating well and jumping like they should be at their age. Not much has happened with them. We will be releasing them in 2 weeks and 3 days."
These past 2 weeks our water quality was better. Our nitrates and nitrites are both 0ppm which is good. The pH was 7.6 for low and 7.8 for high which is perfect for the fish. Luckily our ammonia was 0.25 which is slightly high but not too concerning. We also did not lose any more fish! We hope our water quality will remain good.
This week the salmon have been normal, and they have been swimming everywhere. There is now only 12 days left until we release the salmon. This week the fish are the same size as last week which was 4 centimeters, or you could say 40 millimeters. We have learned that we have been feeding them food that is too small for them, so they are not growing. Also, this week there were no fish that died. This week we also talked to the day care about the salmon, because they are getting a fish.
This is our final week of Tank Teams. 😢 We are releasing our fish next week at Hammer Creek Recreation site on the Salmon River. We have had the salmon for 23 weeks! During that time we tested water quality, and had to add pH down a couple times because the pH was too high for the fish. There was a period of poor water quality that resulted in some deaths, so we had to make sure to change the water and do our jobs well. We also spent time brainstorming what could be the issue. Was it our filter or something else?? We had lot's of adventures with these fish, such as scary power outages. This is important because without power their chiller, bubbler, and filter will turn off! We learned a lot during the process. We learned about the Nimiipuu, an indigenous tribe that live in our area. The Nimiipuu are connected to salmon and the Salmon River. We also learned how to correctly monitor water quality. Salmon are fun to learn about, and this project proves that no matter how old or young you are, YOU can care for wild salmon. Mic Drop 🫳🎤
One last thing, we received many grants that helped make this possible. Thank you to the Rural Grants in Place Group, The Maki Foundation, and the Lightfoot Foundation! 🙏