updates from my school's coral reef project

[mushumatt]

That's a shame that kids do those things, the day after I setup my tank at my parents my 12 yr old brother somehow ruined a mag float algae scraper and successfully scratched the inside pane of my display tank then fed my tank a half container of marine flakes... But he knows better, I was pretty livid when I got home. Earlier in the day I told him he wasn't allowed to touch anything unless I was there or showed him before.

I wish you where closer so I could donate time your doing something awesome, maybe I can convince my alma mater to setup a project like this.

 

[cxvbxghn]

Wow, that is pretty awesome! It is great that the school allows the budget for these projects as it seems harder and harder to keep kids engaged at school. Please keep us informed on how the project is going.

 

[brandoniscool]

Wow, that is pretty awesome! It is great that the school allows the budget for these projects as it seems harder and harder to keep kids engaged at school.

I agree that engagement is vitally important, especially for young students. It's hard to explain to an 8 year old why they need to understand fractions when all they want to do is play with video games when they go home. Many people in their lives don't value academic study and getting them to focus is almost a cultural and physiological war.

Stratton is a Title One School and 81% of the student body is low income. My school's total operational budget is $13,000 annually which is approximately what my project needs in consumables each year. source

My district as denied all requests for funding and actually made me fundraise over 5k to upgrade the electrical wiring in my room and two others to support the power needs of the aquariums. They had district electricians that would have been able to do it for free but made me personally responsible for getting it done. My districts encourages me, but they definitely don't help financially.

What I think is beautiful about my project is that it is truly a community effort that I am thankful for everyday.
Roughly 50% of the funding comes from me personally but the other half has been donated by many companies big and small in the aquarium community. We literally couldn't continue without the help of fellow reefers. Just to put things in perspective, here is a list of donors (apologies if I left anyone else out)

Tropic Marin
LRS Reef Frenzy
Quality Marin
Tunze
Eco Tech
Reeflo
Tampa Bay Salt Water
Two Little Fishies
Kessil
Reef Dynamics
CAD lighting
Diablo Corals
Unique Corals
AquaRay
Algae Barn
Reed Mariculture
Reef To Rainforest Media
Private contributions from over a hundred hobbyists

 

[brandoniscool]

Bubble Tip Anenome

Bubble Tip Anenome

Wanted to post a picture of this bubble tip anemone. The bubbles are so tight that krill (our regular anemone feed) won't stick and just gets pushed right out. Not a horrible problem I guess:

 

[brandoniscool]

Mrs. Gitting's kindergarten class is disappointed that their new tank is still cycling and they don't have any critters yet. Today I took some of the new clownfish by on a visit.

This little dude was particularly excited and his caring nature makes me think he will be a good steward.

He was so excited about the fish that he insisted on showing other classes. I took him to my room and he earnestly explained to my third graders that 'nemo fish' are really called clownfish and that all of the fish in the cup were brothers, not nemo and his dad. There was a little eye rolling but my kids played along.

 

[brandoniscool]

I also wanted to say that Ms. Gitting's class has been checking out reef central. If any of you would like to post some fun facts about clownfish that could be comprehended by a 5 year old, your post would the topic of much animated conversation.

 

[JLynn]

Cute!

I know one interesting fact about clownfish: they are protandrous hermaphrodites, which means that they are all born male, and only the most dominant/largest fish (dominance is based on size) becomes female. If the female dies, one of the males will gain weight, turn into a female, and take its place in the hierarchy.

 

[brandoniscool]

Hello Reef Central,

Haven't check in for a while, I dropped my phone in water last week and it's my main method of taking pictures and posting. Since I checked in, I hired four student managers, Elyes, Jake, Gene and Nipun. They all completed a full resume and wrote down their qualifications for being student managers. Jake's was particularity cute; I'll ask his permission to post it.

We will hold a job fair this Friday and all of the students in the school can apply to be part of the project and will be interviewed by Elyes and Nipun. The 4 managers have been staying after school most weekdays to learn the skills they need to teach the other students. There has been a lot of water spilled the janitors are starting to get grumpy.

I try to squeeze content related to coral reefs into every part of my day and its helped me become both a more creative science teacher and facilitates a more holistic understanding of science by creating connections between marine biology, biology and general chemistry. I think it's pretty valuable, but it's a constant battle for me to advocate for what I'm doing. My district and the common core standards are pretty strict about what science content is taught at different grade levels.

I'm mandated to cover prairie plants and agriculture (it's Illinois after all) this quarter but at a recent field trip to a Farming expo all of our background knowledge in marine biology paid off. My students were the only ones out of 14 attending third grade classes that understood and could discuss the nitrogen cycle and the role that crop rotation and fertilization plays in soil health and farm yield. We got an atta boy from a lot of farmers that looked puzzled when we said we're going corals. My kids also wowed some visiting teachers from the U of I who thought that basic chemistry was outside of the cognitive range of elementary school students.

What makes the aquarium keeping part of my project possible is my school's magnet curriculum. Because of that, once Stratton's micro-society curriculum starts next week, I can devote an hour each day to exclusively teaching marine biology and the art of reef keeping.

 

[brandoniscool]

Yesterday I also have the privilege of hosting a number of lovely ladies from the Pi Beta Phi Sorority at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

For fun and as a thank you gift to our sponsors, my kiddos make collages from old copies of Coral and Reef Hobbyist magazines. It's a rather involved process where students use a die cut press to cut the paper into rectangles, which are sorted by color and then glued into collage patterns. The cutting and sorting is an arduous task and it takes the kids forever to do.

Yesterday my new friends helped me speed things along for my students so they could just focus on the creative process of putting the collage together. In 2 hours week got almost a month's worth of cutting and sorting accomplished. And we had fun.

I made an number of segmented boxes that help kids color sort the paper

Only about 10% of the paper is collage ready and we always make a big mess (which is part of the fun)

The ladies checked out all of the aquariums in our project and we took a group picture giving their 'secret' Pi Beta Phi salute.

Go Team!

 

[brandoniscool]

updates

updates

My managers Elyes, Nipun, Gene and Jake have been working hard after school to perfect their reef keeping skills and held a job fair last week to hire students from around the school to work on our project.

'Hired" students will work with me and my managers for 50 minutes during the school day. My managers will trained their peers and and then under their supervision will care for the aquariums in our school and conduct educational outreach to kids not on the project.

Here's the 'advertisement' board they used during the job fair:

Over 70 students applied and the lines got so long my managers had to interview kids individually.

 

[brandoniscool]

Here's some recent pictures of our tanks

Gene, Elyes and Rohan next to our 120 gallon tank downstairs.

 

[brandoniscool]

Everything is looking pretty good. Our Euphyllia is little bleached, I think the intensity of our lights is part of it.

Rohan and his sister next to the 180 in my room

Lots of tangs and anemones

The 90 gallon in a neighboring third grade room

new 25 gallon tank in a second grade class. Clownfish are holding place for the inverts that are coming soon from a very generous donor!

Love my Tunze Comline Skimmers. They really help keep the tanks clean and protect from the overfeed.

This is a 25 gallon tank in my room that that I"m intending to use as a QT tank for fish when we can afford to get more. It has a lot of Chaetomorpha Algae in it. Gene is scraping off some pods from some used filters to help populate the tank with critters. Best thing about having a ton of kids around is that they can do little jobs like this.

 

[brandoniscool]

Elyes is set up our empty Jellyfish Art tank in a second grade classroom. Love these tanks and they're crazy easy to use.

Elyes's little brother Yonas looks for the tiny clownfish hiding behind the rock. The live rock and clownfish are just to keep the regular biomedia cycled until we can get more jellies. They will be removed before they jellies go in.

 

[brandoniscool]

misc photos I've took

misc photos I've took

lots of little red bubble tip babies being born

Our huge peacock mantis shrimp molted and most of the exoskeleton fell apart but the club is rock hard and very thick. I kept it for a souvenir.

Hard to tell the scale of this photo but this bristle worm has to be 10 inches long.

Henry is a local reefer in high school who has a 50 gallon tank in his bedroom. He donated three fish and some coral to our project when he converted his tank to a eel breeding setup as a school project.

 

[brandoniscool]

Can anyone ID this starfish? It was donated with some live rock 3 years ago, it hasn't grown much but seems to be doing fine. Doesn't eat coral.

 

[brandoniscool]

Gene and Lily read some letters they got from Cindy and Eli at Quality Marine. Anyone on RC want a letter from my students? PM me with you address and it's yours.

 

[jason2459]

If it's not eating coral it could be something similar to the "common" starfish being sold out of KP Aquatics. Echinaster sentus . May be able to contact them to verify. It looks similar just a slight color variation.
http://www.kpaquatics.com/product/common-starfish-md-lg/




That bristle worm looks more then just the common Eurythoe sp. but is a Carribean fireworm which may not be as desirable to have.
Polychaete - Eurythoe complanata.
Carribean Fireworm

http://www.lionfishlair.com/hitchhiker.shtml
http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2003-04/rs/index.php

At least it's not a Eunice worm. If you see any worm with tentacles or antennae get it out and give it it's own tank.

http://echinoblog.blogspot.com/2013/09/who-named-bobbit-worm-eunice-sp-and.html

 

[brandoniscool]

That bristle worm looks more then just the common Eurythoe sp. but is a Carribean fireworm which may not be as desirable to have.
Polychaete - Eurythoe complanata.
Carribean Fireworm

Totally right on it being a fireworm. I don't remember it ever eating anything I want to keep but I'll still try to get it out if only to put it into one of my nano tanks so the kids can look at it. Thanks

 

[brandoniscool]

donation from Live Rock

donation from Live Rock

As many of you know, Richard aka LiveRock from Tampa Bay Saltwater is a generous dude. Quoting one student, today he 'made it rain' by sending us a care package full of invertebrates for our new tanks.

This morning, the office paged my student managers over the intercom announcing to the school that "the liverock care package had arrived". Gene, Nipun, Elyes and Jake put on their uniforms (t-shirts donated by LRS Reef Frenzy) and got to work.

They unboxed everything in front of the Mrs. Gitting's kindergarten class. The little dude up front is the tank leader for the room. Chosen because he's been the most proactive about bugging his teacher about getting and feeding the fish.

I had no idea what we had recieved and was just as curious as all of the kids. Richard has access to amazing livestock and I was very impressed by the variety that he donated. The kids looked at it all, asking all sorts of questions.

While I was most excited about the large conchs and the sea cucumbers, the arrow head crab was hands down the favorite of the kids.

Thanks to Richard, Mrs. Gitting's third grade class now has all kinds of critters to touch and see including a huge hermit crab, two horseshoe crabs, shrimp, starfish, and urchins.

Next up was Mrs. Holzhauer's second grade class (my students next year). After much debate among them and the kindergartners, they got to keep the arrowhead crab in their tank as well as a number of urchins, snails, a horseshoe crab and porcelain crabs.

Each time they added more water to bag acclimate the critters, the entire class had to stop and check everything out. Mrs. Holzhauer was a pretty good sport about it, but I have to remember that not all adults are excited about reefing as the kids and I.

 

[brandoniscool]

I saved most of the more exotic inverts for Mr. Rose's third grade classroom. All of sand, rock and many of the inverts in this tank was donated by Richard two years ago and I want this tank to remain the liverock / ecotech tank. We still have urchins, anemones, crabs, snails and more from that donation and I think they will welcome their gulf brethren.

Plus this tank has the highest nutrient load of all of my tanks and will be a better fit for the sea cucumbers and conchs that were donated. All of Mr. Rose's kids feel like they're 'old hands' at reef keeping now but they still were pretty impressed by some of the rarer things we got. Including this very elaborate decorator crab.

One student got a little squeamish when Gene was holding a crab next to him.

We also added two of the smallest urchins to Mrs. Young's second grade classroom. Her tank is our smallest (not including or jelly tanks) and we're saving room for a pistol shrimp and goby pair (coral banded shrimp will be rehomed.

All in all 4 classrooms got new pets and many, many kids renewed their interested in marine biology and our hobby. Cudos to you Richard, you made a lot of people happy today.