The Needham Reservoir is now home to 40 more brook trout, Massachusetts’ only native trout, thanks to some fourth graders and their second grade buddies at St. Joseph School.
The students raised the fish from eggs to fingerlings in their science lab as part of Trout in the Classroom, a national environmental program of Trout Unlimited that has been in schools for 30 years – but never before in Needham. Math enrichment teacher Susan Howard had participated in the program before coming to St. Joseph and proposed they try it. One of the goals, she said, is to connect students with the natural world.
“A lot of students are not exposed to the natural world and can’t name the birds that live here or the trees that we find here or the flowers or the fish,” said Howard. “So part of it is to kind of establish that idea of connecting students to that so they then care for their environment.”
The students explored the lifecycle of the brook trout and the ecology and ecosystem that a trout needs. “The kids were able to test the water, make their observations,” Howard said. “They watched them, they had to understand survival rates, all those things.”
The project requires a specialized tank, monitoring equipment and a water chiller, all of which were provided by Trout Unlimited. Schools are allowed to use the equipment for two years before it is moved to another school. St. Joseph’s has decided to continue the program and raised the money to buy its own water chiller and related equipment.
Fourth grader Hunt Breed helped manage the tank’s cooling and heating system to get the temperature right. “Trout have to live at a specific temperature for them to have a good life and to reproduce,” he said. “The temperature’s about 45 degrees to 50 degrees, so that was really important in their lifecycle.”
Second graders Molly Mazza and Penny Banu said they first saw the trout when they hatched from their eggs. “They were really small,” said Banu. “It felt like really cool to be having fish that we’ve got to feed and we’ve got to take care of,” said Mazza. They both said they learned a lot. “Even though we had trout I learned a lot about fish in general. Some was about its lifecycle and how they find their food,” said Banu.
MassWildlife was also a partner on the project, providing teacher training, guidance and support. It worked with Howard to handle the permitting required to release the trout into the reservoir in coordination with Needham Director of Conservation Deb Anderson. “It’s important to make sure they’re native fish because it connects to the Charles River,” said Anderson. “I think it’s a great project.”
MassWildlife stocks the reservoir with several hundred rainbow trout each May for the annual Family Fish Festival, but those are fully grown and ready to be caught, unlike the students’ finger-sized fish. “We let them go when they’re only a couple inches long,” Howard said. “They’re not very big.”
Next year she would like to see the program expand. “I hope to bring other people on board. Any time there’s an environmental science program or a sustainability program in a school it needs to grow through the community; that’s really the idea,” she said. “And of course here at St. Joe’s promoting care of the environment and the natural world is part of our mission as well, of being stewards.”
For fourth grader Breed, who enjoys fishing, it was a good experience. “I definitely felt it was very exciting to see them go since I watched them grow up for six or seven weeks of their life,” he said. “It felt really exciting to watch them finally swim away into the wilderness.”
Second graders Mazza and Banu were sad to see the fish go. “But,” they agreed, “it felt like they were ready.”
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