By: Jerry Nunn, Editor
The Guide: April/May 2015
In nearly 200 classrooms across the state, students rear Chinook salmon in partnership with the Michigan DNR. Beginning with salmon eggs in October, students care for the fish through the complicated early stages of their lives, until they release the fish into a Great Lakes tributary in May.
ROGERS CITY - By the time teacher Holly Wirgau's middle school students raise 200 Chinook salmon by hand, the budding fisheries biologists will understand all there is to know about the complex early life cycle of one of the Great Lake's most popular sports fish.
Starting with hatchery-fresh eggs in late October, they'll hatch the salmon right in the classroom, in a cold-water tank, then watch them grow from tiny alevin stage, with their yolk sack at their side, through their fry stage, to the smolt stage the salmon reach in May when students here trek to the nearby Trout River to release three to five inch salmon...