News : VSHA aquascience students and teacher learning variety of new lessons

One of the fish being raised at VSHS; some should be large enough to eat by the end of 2012.

Aquascience students clean the tanks twice each week.

Greg Blind removes a bucket of water while cleaning the tanks.

The blue lobsters recently shed their skin; they look a bit less blue now.

Jacob Patrilla tests the water from the fish tanks.

This crawdad has grown significantly in the tank of the VS aquascience classroom.

Samples indicate by color the levels of ammonia, ph, nitrate and nitrates in the tanks.

This angelfish thrives in an aquarium in the Ag classroom.

An angelfish is among the favorites of some aquascience class members.

Students clean an aquarium in the Ag room on Friday.,

There’s no need to be “koi” about it: There’s something fishy going on in the Vinton-Shellsburg Ag Department.

But this is the kind of fishiness that has students excited about coming to class, and offers a variety of new lessons, and new opportunities for many current and future students.

A few months ago, V-S FFA members Colleen Finch and Abbie Darland spoke to the school board about their hopes for a new aquascience program at the high school. The school board agreed to fund the new class, and the students agreed to help build it.

They spent many of the first weeks of school with Mrs. Fleming, building the large wooden tanks that are covered with plastic and rubber liners.

They have spent the last several months learning how to grow fish, including: How much to feed them, how to test the water for ammonia, nitrate, nitrate and pH levels, and what not do to.

It’s been frustrating at times, says Mrs. Fleming, noting that aquascience is so new that most FFA teachers did not study the subject in college.

But despite the frequency with which students remove a dead fish from the top of the tank, or mourn a mistake like the one that killed all of the koi, the program is successful in many ways already, says Mrs. Fleming.

Eventually, the students hope and plan to raise and sell fish in all three areas: Decorative fish for aquariums, young fish for stocking ponds, and mature fish (including prawn) for human consumption. They also hope to create an aquaponics system that allows them to grow lettuce or other vegetables.

The students who began the school year by helping to build the wooden tanks that now serve as the home for bluegill and tilapia included girls who had never used a drill before.

“On the last day of the trimester, when we were cleaning up the greenhouse, they looked at the tank and realized, ‘Hey, I did this,’” recalls Mrs. Fleming. “They said this is something they can show their kids one day, and tell them that they built this.”

The excitement at building the tanks and filling the aquarium continues with each trimester, as a new group of students finds out how exciting it is to learn aquascience.

And the lessons are just beginning.

First, the students had to learn how to keep fish alive and growing in the tanks. Despite the recent loss of the koi, the students feel as though they have kept the other fish alive long enough to have confidence in their ability to maintain living schools of fishes in a variety of tanks.

There are angelfish and blue lobster (although they recently shed their skins, so they look more grey than blue), along with gold fish and other smaller species in the aquariums in the classroom.

On Friday, the students were engaged in the bi-weekly duty of cleaning the tanks and testing the water. Mrs. Fleming said that the students are so excited about the class that they tackle even this cleaning duty without needing and pushing from the teacher.

The class, and its range of projects, continues to increase.

The prawn tank is ready for the arrival of up to 1,000 prawn, expected to arrive by next month. Mrs. Fleming and her students also hope that by the end of 2012, the fish they are growing will be big enough to serve a meal for the community.

“It won’t happen this school year, but it should be possible later in 2012,” she says.

Finch sat at a desk in the Ag classroom on Friday, testing the water levels for pH, ammonia, nitrate and nitrate levels. She said that the class has proven to be as exciting and challenging as she hoped it would be when she was discussing it with the school board.

The next step for the class is to create an aquaponics system that uses the waste from the fish as nourishment for plants. Mrs. Fleming and her students are researching a variety of ways to do that. Like most other aspects of the class, however, this is an area where Vinton-Shellsburg is a pioneer, at least among Iowa school districts. There are no other districts with such systems in place. The VS aquascience class and its teacher are continuing to learn this new topic by research and trial and error.