Dexter Lash-Burrows
and Micheal Tynjala
Student reporters
The students at A. J. Elliott in Sointula on Malcolm Island are once again hatching salmon eggs for the DFO Salmon Enhancement Program.
The students who take care of the fish — Dexter, Micheal, Molly and Malcolm — are called the Salmon Dream Team.
Their job is to clean the tank, feed the fish and do the ATU, which means accumulated thermal units.
We don’t measure the salmon’s age in units of time, we measure their age in units of temperature.
Every day a member of the Salmon Dream Team looks at the temperature and adds it to the previous day’s temperature.
On the Monday morning of Feb. 28 when we got to school, we were amazed to see the eggs had hatched over the weekend!
We are planning to release the juvenile salmon, called smolts, in Rough Bay Creek here on the island at about 1200 ATU.
They are sitting at about 675 now and the projected date for release is the week of May 21.
We are doing this to increase the population of salmon on the west coast.
This is very interesting and we hope we can do it next year.