TIC Report for May 2008
Barry Forgeng
 
We have entered the 2008 mini-grant season for Trout in the Classroom. Currently, we have one new school that will apply. The school is “Council Rock High School South”.  We will be preparing their grant application and submitting to the “PA Council of Trout Unlimited” prior to May 23rd which is the deadline for submission.  Hopefully, this school will one of the recipients of this award.  Last year there were 13 grants available and around 30 schools applied.  We were lucky enough to have one school, which our chapter sponsored, awarded this grant.
 
The 2007-2008 TIC program has been going extremely well until the last few weeks.  William Tennant HS, who was the grant recipient last year is experiencing some sort of disease which is killing off the fish.  The teacher who is a Biologist thinks it may be “Whirling Disease” because of the behavior the fish exhibit when they die.
 
The fish in William Tennant are Rainbow Trout and they are ~ 3 inches long. The kids and teacher have been having a great time raising them and have learned a great deal about ecology, cold water resources and the delicate life cycle of a trout.  The school program started off with 200 eggs which were cared for with kid gloves because of the extremely fragile nature of trout at the beginning of their life cycle.  Actually, as we know, their entire existence is dependant on near perfect conditions.
 
As we were planning the release for late May (exact date was never nailed down), some fish started having issues.  Their tails would get a kink in them and they would start going round in a circle for a while until they just nosed dived into the bottom and died.  Based on that behavior, the teacher researched and came to a conclusion they may have “Whirling disease” which is really bad and very contagious.  Unless there is a miracle, these fish will not be released into Watson Creek.  The risk of infecting the native population would be devastating to that stream.
 
I contacted the PFBC (PA Fish & Boat Commission) who supplied the eggs from their hatchery.  I spoke to their head Pathology guy and we are arranging to send them frozen specimens that the teacher collected.  If indeed it is Whirling disease, it may have come from the hatchery which as you can imagine could have many ramifications with all the eggs and fish produced and distributed.  The PFBC expert feels pretty confident it is not this disease but wants to run tests to verify.
 
That’s all for now.  I’ll send a message out when we get the results.
More information on TIC can be found at: http://www.troutintheclassroom.org