Number of Fish Removed: EVERYONE!!!
Today was the BIG DAY!!! The big presentation was held in the Elementary School Library and it actually consisted of 3 separate but identical presentations (one for 3rd grade, one for 4th grade, and one for 5th grade). I brought all my equipment for caring for the fish down to the library to set up everything and prepare myself. I rented a visual data projector from the public library along with a cart and transported those down to the elementary school as well. The presentation consisted of many pictures I had taken over the course of the last 5 months along with a brief introduction to what the SIC program is. For the majority of the presentation, however, I talked a lot about the growth patterns of Chinook salmon during their early development and explained a lot of observations that I had made while caring for the fish. I tried to explain everything I possibly could during the half hour time block I was given, but there is just so much that you learn when you do the SIC project, that it is not even possible to cram everything into 30 minutes. I printed up some brochures that I had made special for the presentation and hand out somewhere between 120 and 125 brochures to all the students and teachers, unfortunately there wouldn't be enough for everyone to have their own, so everyone shared them. There was somewhere between 300 and 400 kids who attended the presentations in all. The first presentation was for the 3rd grade and it was held from 8:45 am to 9:20 am. The second presentation was for 4th grade and it was held from 10:00am until 10:30am. the third and final presentation was for the 5th graders and it was held from 12:00pm until 12:30pm. I felt as if the first presentation was a little off, it was a little over whelming to be talking to so many people at once, and at the same time, since it was the first presentation I feel like it was just difficult to make everything flow together nicely. The second presentation was definitely the best of all the presentations, it flowed perfectly and I seemed to be able to fit just about everything I wanted to talk about into the 30 minute time slot. The 3rd presentation was not quite as good as the second was and it was the presentation that I actually recorded. Even though the 3rd went pretty well, it still had a few places where things did not flow very well and I feel like I repeated myself quite a few times, almost talking in circles. The 3rd presentation fell somewhere between the first and second as far as how well it went. On a scale from one to 10, 10 being the best,I would say the 2nd presentation was a 9, the third was about a 7 and the first presentation was maybe a 4 or 5.
At 2:30pm, after all the presentations were finished and everything was cleaned up, I went back down to the public library and began to prepare the salmon for the release. I scooped about 3 and a half gallons of water into a 5 gallon bucket then began catching fish from the aquarium with the green net. It took about 15 to 20 minutes to catch everyone. I tried to count each fish as I put them into the bucket to try and double check my number of fish, but halfway through I lost count and gave up. I'm assuming that the official count is 113 fish which is what it should be, according to my records. At 3:00pm, my teacher, his two daughters, and myself along with the lady from the daycare and two daycare kids, drove out to the release site (designated by the MDNR). All of the kids had a chance to catch a few fish and release them and I did my best to try and get it all on camera and video. It was a really fun time! All the fish in the bucket still looked pretty healthy after the long car ride, although there were a few at the bottom laying on their side but they were still moving. They might not have been getting enough oxygen from the water. Once we released them into the lake though, the ones on their sides were perfectly fine, you couldn't even tell they had been weakened by the trip. After release, all the fish looked like they would make it, but they seemed a little confused...in awe maybe by the openness of their new "aquarium". At first they didn't move, but after a while most of them figured it out and headed out into deeper water. Some of them hid in the rocks, seaweed and algae at first, and they needed more coaxing to get them out into the cooler, deeper water where they would be more likely to survive and less likely to be washed up on shore or caught in the water pools. We caught the ones who were sticking too close to shore and released them a little further out. Eventually, everyone swam away, and just like that, the project was over!
