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Michelle Keohane (Land Use Planner for Lesser Slave Area Sustainable Resource Development ) and Leah Lovequist (Public Information, Education and Outreach Officer for Lesser Slave Area Sustainable Resource Development ) stand beside covered aquarium tank which now contains rainbow trout eggs

Some students at C.J. Schurter School will have lots of fun caring for these rainbow trout eggs and Leah Lovequist with SRD says the eggs will hatch into alevins (fish with yolk sacs) in the next 2 weeks.

Leah Lovequist speaks with the grade 3 students about The FINs Program. The blue insulated lunch box contains a thermos filled with 116 rainbow trout eggs which will be cared for by the two grade 3 classes.

The students from Miss McBride’s and Mrs. Horsman’s Grade 3 classrooms are participating in the FinS (or Fish in Schools) program, a Government of Alberta fisheries education program that provides a firsthand experience of raising fish in the classroom.

On January 28, 2010, over one hundred rainbow trout eggs were delivered to the classroom and placed in a carefully prepared incubation aquarium.

Over the next four months or so, students will actively monitor the development of rainbow trout from the egg to fry life cycle stage. Students will discover that maintaining a healthy environment in their aquarium is critical to the survival of their fish. The classes then release their fish in a provincially approved water body to complete the program.

In early June, the rainbow trout will be released into Parker Lake which is located South of Slave Lake.

The FinS program aims to instil a lifelong sense of stewardship by giving students more knowledge and understanding of rainbow trout and their habitat. The program also challenges participants to consider their personal impacts and actions on aquatic ecosystems.

Fertilized (eyed) rainbow trout eggs. The eggs will hatch into alevins (fish with yolk sacs) in the next 2 weeks.

FinS was first piloted in Alberta in 1998 and was modelled after a federal program raising salmon from eggs in BC and Yukon classrooms.

Twenty classrooms across Alberta are participating in the FinS Program and this is the first time the program has been administered in the Lesser Slave Area. The program successfully releases about 1,000 rainbow trout each year.

John Tchir, Senior Fisheries Biologist for the Lesser Slave Area is the Fisheries Representative for the FinS program at C.J. Schurter School with Lovequist as project advisor.

Where do the eggs come from? The eggs for the FinS program were artificially spawned on January 7 at the Alison Creek Brood Station located in the Crowsnest Pass. The eggs are from a spawning group of three-year-old rainbow brood stock (12 females and 24 males) that resulted in the lot of 52,000 eggs.