Trout in the classroom, but no kids

Charles H. Featherstone/The Columbia Basin Herald Environmental Educator Heather Killinger of the Grant County Conservation District tries to position a bubbler at the bottom of a fish tank full of trout eggs at North Elementary School on Thursday.

by Charles H. Featherstone Staff Writer
| January 20, 2017 2:00 AM

MOSES LAKE — There were supposed to have been 60 kids watching while Heather Killinger did her work.

But it was one more day of cold, ice, and fog in the Columbia Basin, and North Elementary School was closed — along with all the other schools in the Moses Lake School District — encased in a layer of nearly impassable ice.

Killinger, however, had to be here, to pour 100 trout eggs into a fish tank. They were close to hatching, and she’d already been delayed twice by the weather.

“They should hatch sometime early next week, Monday or Tuesday,” Killinger said as she struggled to anchor a bubbler on the bottom of the North Elementary School’s lobby fish tank.

An environmental educator with the Grant County Conservative District, Killinger braved the roads and the ice to deliver hundreds of fertilized fish eggs to schools across the region on Wednesday as part of the conservation district’s “Trout in the Classroom” program.

“When they hatch, the kids get attached to them, they give them names, and I don’t know how they tell them apart,” Killinger said of the hundred or so trout eggs scattered on the bottom of the tank.

The kids of Candace Pitts’ kindergarten class will be caring for the trout fry this year, watching them hatch, monitoring the quality of the water, feeding the fish, and then releasing them into Moses Lake at the beginning of June.

“It was great last year,” Pitts said of the North Elementary fifth-graders who raised last year’s trout. “The kids loved to see each stage of development.”

According to Killinger, caring for the fish — including checking the nitrate, ammonia, and pH levels of the water — helps teach the kids about the importance of clean water and it also improves the survival rate of the trout in their care.

Pitts and Killinger wrapped the tank in insulated blanket as Killinger prepared to deliver another hundred fish eggs to another dark, cold, ice-enveloped elementary school. The trout fry would need complete darkness until they hatched, Pitts said, an event she hoped children would be able to see.

“Well, on to Ritzville,” Killinger said as she ventured out into the cold.