School of Fish Studies

As classmates looked on, 10 Orangeview Junior High students donned rubber overalls last week and splashed through the chilly San Gabriel River to free their class trout for the next phase of their life cycle.

Some saluted their guppy-sized, finned friends with sad waves as others waded back to pick up trash on the bank and keep their trout’s new living area clean.

The seventh- and eighth-grade students have been surrogate parents to the rainbow trout since receiving a batch of about 100 fertilized eggs in January. Orangeview, in Anaheim, is one of about 25 Orange County schools--from the elementary to high school levels--participating this year in “Trout in the Classroom,” a program that gives students a hands-on environmental lesson.

“It’s sad because you have them in your class and you feed them and take care of them, and they’re like your friends,” said Ana Parsons, 14, of Cypress. “But we have to release them because they have to go back to their home. It’s nice, but it’s sad.”

The Fly Fishers Club of Orange County, which has sponsored the program locally for four years, brings in fertilized eggs donated by the state Department of Fish and Game and helps classes set up an aquarium. For the next three months, students watch the eggs hatch and the trout mature into fry.

When the trout reach about one inch in length, the students make a field trip to either the San Gabriel Canyon or Monrovia Canyon Park in Los Angeles County to release them.

The club is finishing up about three weeks of releases this weekend and will be making egg deliveries to different schools at the beginning of April, said Daniel Iwata, chairman of the program’s steering committee.

The maturation process takes about eight weeks, which gives the group enough time to make three egg deliveries each school year, Iwata said.

But raising trout is more difficult than taking care of goldfish, he said. Because the aquarium water must be kept at about 52 degrees, the club provides water chillers for most schools.

The program started about 10 years ago in Northern California and began in Orange County five years ago at Hermosa Drive Elementary School in Fullerton with the help of the South Coast chapter of Trout Unlimited. The Fly Fishers Club of Orange County took over in late 1992 and has been doubling the program’s size each year since.

Other Southern California fly-fishing clubs have set up “Trout in the Classroom” programs in surrounding counties, including Los Angeles and San Bernardino, Iwata said.

Iwata credits the program’s success with its unique, hands-on curriculum.

“It teaches kids about the environment, the importance of our watersheds and of the forest habitat,” he said. “It really gets into the ecological balance, which a lot of kids in an urban setting don’t get to experience.”

Jim Caros, a sixth-grade teacher at Arroyo Vista Elementary School in Rancho Santa Margarita, who has welcomed the trout program into his classroom for three years, said he now uses it in place of his life science lessons.

“They learn the anatomy of a person through the anatomy of a trout because basically their spleen and heart do the same things as ours,” he said. “We’re not just doing it to raise fish; it also teaches them about environmental awareness and science.”

Caros’ students said they liked learning about the trout’s life cycle and sharing their knowledge with other students.

“Once in a while, a kid will walk by the tank because they’re so interested in them,” said David Zigray, 12, of Rancho Santa Margarita. “I’ll tell them about the trout and maybe let them feed them.”

But taking care of the trout for three months was long enough for Elise Barford, 12, who said she’s looking forward to their release next week.

“I’m not going to miss them,” said Barford, of Coto de Caza. “I have to feed them and they eat crushed-up worms, and it smells awful.”

Orangeview teacher Rene Miller said she was surprised at how attached students get to the scaly and sometimes smelly creatures.

“In the beginning, I thought, ‘Am I going to be stuck doing all this stuff?’ ” she said. “But I was just so surprised by how much they took over and work as a team to take care of them. They’re like their kids now.”