The fish hatchery breeds and raises and distributes Atlantic Landlocked Salmon into lakes and ponds all over the Northeast...today they were milking adult specimens of the fish for milt (which is fish for sperm) and eggs...
Being there for the process allowed the kids to see fish-farming up close and personal, and to get a look at some beautiful fish...
Some of our kids even got to help with harvesting the eggs, a process which is almost like milking a cow, except with more scales and less cowbell...
We then went back into the incubation room where they put the fertilized eggs (they mix the eggs and milt up in buckets, and then house them for 10 weeks while the eggs mature and hatch)...
The students also got to see some new stock which is being added to the genetic mix, both in the tanks and in the Adirondack ponds around here where they live and breed free-range...these new salmon are from Maine...
This is the big tanker truck into which the fish will go for transport to their new pond homes once they have grown to the appropriate size...
After the fish hatchery, we headed over to the Wild Center, a great little natural history museum in Tupper Lake, where we started off with lunch...everyone (except me, of course) was a bit cold after the hatchery, and some lunch was a necessary step in getting ready for the second half of our field trip...PB&J tastes better on a field trip...
I circulated with a group of 6th graders through the various exhibits in the museum, they have lots of touchy-feely stuff for kids to play/learn with...the one pictured above taught them all about the effects of high winds on plant-life in our high-mountain ecosystems (at the tops of our tall peaks)...
This exhibit had lots of great information about how glaciation has had an impact on the Adirondack region over the last 100,000 years...at one time there had been beluga whales swimming where we now live and work...at another, there was ice more than 2 miles thick towering above us...
Looking at the effects of glacial erosion on the region by trying to scrape rocks on rocks was an interesting object lesson for the children...
Some other students posed for me in front of the deep lakes exhibits...it was tough to get the kids away from the face-to-face opportunities with the trout and sturgeon in this huge tank...
One of the educators had a raven from their rehabilitation program to show the children...he was full of all sorts of information about the beautiful bird...
We finished off our visit with a movie that the Wild Center produced in-house, A Matter of Degrees, narrated by Sigourney Weaver (who has house in nearby Long Lake, NY)...it is filmed locally, and looks at the effects of ice-ages on the geography and wildlife of the region...it is produced using a special panoramic technique that wraps around the room using an ultra-wide screen and 3 projectors...it was great...
One of my favorite parts of the 1/2 hour film was when they talked about the period in our past when 20 foot ground sloths roamed the Adirondacks...I like the idea of 20 foot ground sloths!
This was a great day! Super kids, awesome learning opportunities, great people to work with...I sometimes have trouble believing that I get paid for this stuff...
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