We took an official measurement today. Most of them are a little over an inch now. Which means they can be upgraded to size 1 food. The majority of them are starting to show their parr markings which means we can call them parr or fingerlings. Sorry for the poor picture quality. These guys move awfully fast now.
On March 21st, almost all of our trout reached the swim-up stage. At this point, we went ahead and released them into the big tank. We have a video of this which we hope to have posted soon. Now that they are swimming around we can call them Fry.
During spring break, I came in and found all the eggs had hatched. We did have some that had hatched but did not develop properly. So we lost about 10 or so. Which means we have about 85 in the tank.
PS: Sorry it took so long for a new post to appear. Technology issues prevented posting for awhile. We are still having issues loading the flip camera videos to the computer. As soon as the issue is resolved we will post the videos.
We lost another one day. This poor little trout could not get out of it's egg. He has been struggling since yesterday. So today we made the call that he would not make it. Down to 98 now.
Here is one of our little Alevin that is totally hatched. Notice his yolk sac underneath him.
(New picture: other one was a little blurry)
As of yesterday afternoon, our first trout has hatched. The hatched trout is called an alevin. This morning when we came in we have one that is halfway out of it's egg. And we have plenty more eggs wriggling around getting ready to hatch. In about a week, they will enter the swim-up stage.
We have had our first death. We noticed on Friday that this little egg had no eyes. We had hoped it would start to develop over the weekend but still no eyes. Alas fish one had to go to the great fish tank in the sea.
Our eggs arrived yesterday afternoon. Let's hope all 100 hatch. We are not sure when they will hatch but as soon as they hatch all eggs will hatch within 2-3 days. If you look closely at the eggs, you will notice little blue dots. These dots are the eyes. That is why they are called eyed eggs. Yesterday, when they were acclimating to the water you could see the little babies wriggling in their eggs everytime some more cold water was placed on them. Now the wait begins.
Thanks to Texas FlyFishers, our Aquatic Science Class will be doing Trout in the Classroom. Trout in the Classroom is a program that allows students to raise trout in a class setting and then release them in the wild. The tank we are using is a 55 gallon tank set up to a chiller set currently at 66 degrees F. Trout are a cold water fish hence the chiller. Once our eggs are delivered we will insulate the tank and then drop the temperature down to a chilly 52 degrees. We set up our in mid-January and now we are just waiting for our trout eggs to be delivered. Check back often to see how well our tank and trout are doing.
