ELLENSBURG — Fisheries biologist Bob Tuck on Wednesday boldly stood in front of about 75 talkative fourth-graders at Lincoln Elementary School in Ellensburg and gently slapped, repeatedly, the side of a 25-pound fall chinook salmon.
“What am I doing?” asked Tuck, raising his voice, demanding the students’ attention. “What is this stuff? You can feel it on the fish.”
Hands go up, wrong answers are given, but they’re good tries.
Finally, someone correctly answered, “slime.”
Tuck then takes off with a presentation that he’s done for seven years in hundreds of classrooms from Grandview to Easton as part of the Salmon in the Classroom program.
“Slime on the fish has a very serious purpose,” Tuck said. “It’s the first level of protection for the fish in the wild.” The slime, secreted by the fish, creates a coat that acts as a defense against infection from bacteria, parasites and fungus.
“If you handle a fish too much, and too much slime comes off, if you release that fish into the water, it may look happy swimming away, but in 30 days it can die.”
Tuck estimates he and his wife, Lynn, who direct the nonprofit Yakima Basin Environmental Education Program, give dissection presentations in front of students 60 to 70 times every school year.
The overall program, which was started by Tuck and a volunteer board in 1991, reaches out to students in first through 12th grade in Kittitas and Yakima counties.
That’s 23 school districts and six private schools.
Tuck believes the program’s three activities — in-school salmon rearing projects, fall visits to the spring chinook spawning grounds on the Cle Elum River and the classroom fish dissections — involve more than 5,000 students a year.
And it’s the hands-on, up-close-and-personal experience that the program offers that teachers say helps bring the facts, literally, alive and has students learning and practicing a variety of academic skills.
And it’s the hands-on, up-close-and-personal experience that the program offers that teachers say helps bring the facts, literally, alive and has students learning and practicing a variety of academic skills.
In turn, the experiences and the skills, teachers say, can last a lifetime and, perhaps, lead to a fulfilling career.
On Wednesday, Tuck warned the excited students — pupils of teachers Toby Mahre, Katie Hull and Katherine Malcolm — he was going to cut into the fish to reveal its eggs and organs.
Tuck said he didn’t want to hear a loud, prolonged wave of “oohs and ahhs” and “eews” as he did so that drown out his presentation and others’ questions.
Yet, when he cut into the fish, there was, indeed, a prolonged wave of loud oohs, ahhs and eews.
Ten-year-old Elliot Hougardy, in Hull’s class, said he’s interested in fish because he likes to eat fish and go fishing.
“It’s cool because you can see all the organs in the fish,” Hougardy said about the Wednesday presentation. “You see how they’re like us and how they’re different.”
Carissa Burgess, 9, in Mahre’s class, said it would be “cool” to be a biologist.
There also was Camille Bruya, 10, who said it was “interesting to see how different fish are from us and how they live.”
The goal of the program, Tuck said before the presentation, is to help teachers bring understanding to students about the natural resources “all around us.”
“We are trying to make sure it’s not boring and they get a personal connection to our natural resources.”
Mahre has involved his fourth-graders in a salmon-rearing project in the past four school years after taking it over from retiring teacher Jane Carson.
The rearing project involves Tuck’s program supplying fertilized salmon eggs in early January to local schools. With a large fish tank lined with gravel, a water chiller and aerator, the eggs are raised into small fish through the school year.
In some cases, the program helps buy the equipment.
The students keep records charting fish growth over time, using math, measurement, writing, spelling, observation and reading skills.
They also get a dose of Washington state history.
In addition, they learn about water quality, riparian habitats, irrigation and what fish need to thrive and what threatens them.
Similar fish-rearing projects are under way in the Kittitas, Thorp, Damman, Cle Elum-Roslyn and Easton school districts.
Malcolm said when students can “experience it, touch it, manipulate it with hands on” they usually have a more memorable learning situation and can better recall it and the concepts and skills they learned.
“They get to use all their senses to put the facts together with what they’re experiencing,” Hull said on Wednesday. “What they learned today fits in with their academic learning to make it real.”
Tuck, from Selah, has been a fisheries biologist for 35 years, and his wife is a microbiologist.
He said delving into the inside of a fish never fails to get the students roused and excited.
“It’s a pretty spectacular presentation for the kids, all the blood and guts,” Tuck said with a laugh. “That really gets their interest. Then we try to get them to think about our natural environment in light of the presentation.
“They even get to touch some of the stuff at the end. A lot say it’s yucky, but they now have a better understanding.”
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