Students bid farewell to young trout at Lake Ralphine

It was with mostly mixed emotions that a group of Guerneville grade school students bid farewell Wednesday to tiny rainbow trout they'd raised over the weeks since buckets of pearly eggs with dark eyeballs were delivered to their classrooms.

They monitored the eggs until they jiggled and hatched, emerging as odd-looking creatures with attached yolk sacs they would soon absorb — though at the time, the huge goiter-like growths made them look "like pregnant womans," one student said.

"Their mother packed it," said a classmate, Bonnie Vazquez, 9. "It's like a lunch sack for them."

As the fourth- and fifth-graders took up feeding the minuscule trout fry and worked to keep their water chilled and aerated, the wriggling critters grew until it was time to release them into Howarth Park's Lake Ralphine on Wednesday.

But it was with a bit of melancholy that some of the youngsters gently dipped small paper cups toward the shade-covered lake surface, introducing the small fry to a brand new water world they gingerly explored before swimming off.

"I felt sad," said Hunter MacDonell, 10. "We had them for so long, and it's like they've been a part of the class — like a class pet, like a part of the family."

Letting go of a fish he'd just named Jackie Chan, 9-year-old Shayne White said he was both "sad and happy."

"Sad, because they're going," he said, "and happy because they're going and growing up."

Three Guerneville School classes were among 13 around Sonoma and Mendocino counties that received trout eggs from a Redding-area hatchery about six weeks ago under a program sponsored by the Russian River Wild Steelhead Society.

It's the stewardship group's fourth year of participating in the project, modeled after Trout in the Classroom, an educational program overseen by Trout Unlimited, according to society president Bruce MacDonell.

The Wild Steelhead Society usually uses eggs from the Warm Springs Hatchery at Lake Sonoma, releasing the fish into approved tributaries in the Russian River watershed.

Eggs from the Redding-area hatchery were used this year because the drought delayed the arrival of spawning steelhead to the Warm Springs Hatchery, MacDonell said.

Rainbow trout and steelhead are the same species. The main distinction is adult steelhead migrate from the ocean to fresh water to spawn.

The program includes a curriculum focusing on the species' life cycle, anatomy, habitat and common food sources, like mayflies and other insects.

Jamie Daniels' blended fourth- and fifth-grade class lost several of their fish, but it provided an opportunity to talk about wildlife mortality rates.

Then they got to watch as their fry grew slightly larger than those in other classes, she said, adding, "less competition."

One of several fishermen casting off a dock near the the students' field trip spot happened to catch a couple of rainbow trout Wednesday, and showed his catch to the kids so they could see what the fry might look like at maturity.

Their delight suggested they weren't thinking too far ahead about whether one of their still itty-bitty trout might find itself on a hook one day.

One student asked, "Are you going to eat that?"

(You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com.)