updates from my school's coral reef project

[mbemount]

Was lucky enough to stop by and see the setup. Pretty awesome, really wish that I would have had something like this growing up!

Brandon let the kids give us the tour and explain everything. It's really impressive what the kids have learned in the past few months. They were telling me about all the types of fish/coral and were even showing us the live brine shrimp under a microscope!

Thanks for letting us stop by! Looking forward to seeing the progress over the next couple months.

 

[brandoniscool]

I'm very excited to see the local reef community starting to get involved with Stratton's Coral Reef Project. With the help of other adults, who knows where we can go?

Sunday a new marine aquarist called me up out of the blue and donated a hermit crab for one of our classroom tanks. A friend of a friend told him about the project.

Thanks to all in the reef community for the word of mouth recommendations. All visitors are welcome. My friend's generosity was repaid by some frogspawn and green start polyp frags.

 

[brandoniscool]

Quality Marine was there for my class

Quality Marine was there for my class

Today I was helped out with some technical advice from my friend Eli from Quality Marine and I wanted to share the support they've provided to my project.

Quality Marine was the first major company to donate product and saved my first tank by replacing a shorting out metal halide light with new AquaRay LED's and donating some much needed equipment. Until I got an RO system from them, I was hauling 40+ gallons of water in my hatchback from home to school each week.

 

[brandoniscool]

In December, Quality Marine gave me a generous discount and helped me purchase fish and coral for all of the new tanks we had set up this year at Stratton. Kids from all around the school researched different fish and after much debate put together an order.

After planning weeks ahead for the delivery, my wife found out she had to have emergency surgery the night before the order arrived. My two main reef bosses, Savanna and Aislin took over and without help from any adult, acclimated all of the fish themselves with zero deaths. I was very proud of them

So far all of the fish that arrive are still alive (with the exception of a jump out and a sick mandarin) and very healthy. Along with the quality of the fish, I felt like the order came with free technical support. I'm still inexperience with many types of fish and Cindy my rep patiently fielded dozens of questions.

Thanks to all of the local reefers and big business players.

 

[Mcgeezer]

Keep up the good work! Glad to see kids interested in marine life and science in general.

 

[brandoniscool]

Market Day

Market Day

Stratton Elementary School has 'Market Days' where all 406 students can take turns visiting different classrooms to learn about the projects other kids are working on. I'm usually out in the hallway managing traffic but I 'caught' Savanna showing of some living things in our 90 gallon tank. I'm glad I saw the moment, it helps show how interested ALL of the students at Stratton are in our reef tanks.

<iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/117349772" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/117349772">Savanna showing off the tank to other students.</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user28704363">Brandon Rutherford</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

 

[brandoniscool]

more market day photos

more market day photos

Here my student Freckles is trying to show a passing student our new hermit crab. Behind her are microscopes where students can view newly hatched brine shrimp nauplii. The kid in the orange vest is a 'peace officer' who volunteered to stand guard by the crab to make sure that it stays safe (his idea not mine).

More students checking out the nauplii

 

[brandoniscool]

Leon is selling some old shells to students for school currency during market day. Most of the other classroom projects consist of making crafts to sell on market day or creating performances of some sort. My project is thousands of dollars in fake money debt btw.

 

[brandoniscool]

LRS Reef Frenzy Swag

LRS Reef Frenzy Swag

Thanks to Larry for the cool LSR Reef Frenzy defroster. It allows the kids to thaw the food without dripping fishing smelling water all over the classroom. Very handy:

 

[brandoniscool]

Haven't really posted many pictures of a 30 gallon tank in a fifth grade classroom cared for by Savanna.

The kids are one hundred percent in charge of this tank and it's a little overfed but the mushrooms and other soft things seem to thrive there. There's a tiny mantis shrimp that lives in there (hitchhiked in from some excellent live rock) but I decided to move the little guy out and put in this monster as a surprise for the class. Saw him at my LFS Sailfin (excellent place btw) and had to have him. Hard to say but he has to be over 2.5 inches long. Wondering if I'll have to move the clown fish out as well. Any thoughts?

 

[whiteshark]

This is the coolest thing in the history of ever and makes me want to drive down to Illinois. Keep up the fantastic work!

Re:Mantis, it's a risk to house it with anything else really. Keep it well fed and hopefully it will leave everything else alone. I'd move any fish, crabs, snails, etc. you don't want dead out myself.

Take this with a grain of salt though. I haven't actually owned a mantis myself.

 

[brandoniscool]

This is the coolest thing in the history of ever and makes me want to drive down to Illinois.

Open invitation dude. We also skype with people all of the time. PM me if you're interested.

Don't care much about the clown fish but I'm trying to model responsible animal husbandry so I'll probably move them. The mantis shrimp will definitely be well fed, the kids line up to feed it, one of the reasons there's so much algae in that tank.

 

[bklynreef123]

Brandon how can we contribute to the project in terms of donations of money and materials? I'm sure members would be happy to make donations. Keep up the stellar work!

 

[brandoniscool]

Brandon how can we contribute to the project in terms of donations of money and materials? I'm sure members would be happy to make donations. Keep up the stellar work!

Foremost my goal is to enrich the lives of my students and share my project with the reefing community with the hopes that other schools do something similar.

But because the project doesn't get any funding from my school district, I do have to raise money. About 50% of the funding comes from me personally and 50% from donors.

Reef Central has been very good to me and has asked me not to solicit donations or fundraise on their site. I welcome you or anyone else to email or call me if you'd like to help.

This said, one of the best ways to support my kids and my project is to spread the word of what we're doing. My corporate donors want to know that the public is interested. They've been the biggest help so far and an email to the companies listed on my site goes a long way to encouraging them to donate in the future.

:wave:

 

[JoelA7]

Wonderful. Honor is due.

 

[Fishmaster13]

this is SO awesome. Its cool to see that you are teaching kids about reef tanks and other forms of fish care at such an early age... i really think it will pay off in more ways than just tank care (teaches them responsibility about other aspects in life).

I wish we had a program like this when i was in school... all we ever had were guinea pigs and lizards haha

You had that! All we ever had was a goldfish in my science teachers classroom

 

[drakedeming]

Amazing project and your school looks awesome. Project based learning seems like a really cool idea in general.

 

[Kyuss]

Great to see you were able to expand on this program. What a great way to learn, and I'd imagine to keep kids attention in learning as well. When I was in school I absolutely hated math and did horrible at it. Wasn't til I was a teen and got into working on cars that stuff like math started to make a whole lot more sense because there was something behind all those numbers. That made all the difference in the world and I later went into engineering. Having something to tie it all together is how I learned "how to learn".

Great stuff and keep up the great work. You have some very smart kids there.

 

[brandoniscool]

Savanna's class got a mantis shrimp

Savanna's class got a mantis shrimp

Today was an exciting day for Savanna's class. Last night I scooped up a huge peacock mantis shrimp from my LFS Sailfin for a 30 gallon tank in a fifth grade classroom. All of the kids love the tiny mantis shrimp already in their tank and were excited about getting an upgrade.

We started the day watching 'True Facts About the Mantis Shrimp" on youtube.

The kids in the classroom were aghast when I suggested that we let the bigger mantis shrimp eat the smaller and insisted on moving their old shrimp to the QT tank above their reef tank. This required them to take all of the rock out of the tank and since I was teaching my own class down the hall they had to do it all by themselves. They made a huge mess.

I had a parent bring in the shrimp at the end of the day to acclimate it once the water in the tank settled. I was worried about stressing the shrimp but had to briefly show it off around the school.

Savanna was really excited and stayed 2 hours after school and carefully drip acclimate it. Kudos to her mom Stacey in the background who waited patiently during the process.

Unfortunately when the mantis shrimp was out of the bag it started behaving abnormally. It was very sluggish and stayed on a top rock, not moving much. I was expecting it to immediately hide. I'm scared that after all of the hard work and excitement, the stress of the move from sea to tank and the unbalanced water chemistry from taking out the rock will kill it.

Does anyone have any ideas of how to keep it in good health other than proper feeding and water chemistry?

 

[brandoniscool]

<iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/117645268" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/117645268">Untitled</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user28704363">Brandon Rutherford</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>