Progress

Now that all of the fish have hatched, they're a little harder to find. Some should be reaching the end of the alevin stage, so their bodies are growing and the egg sac is shrinking. So far, they are doing very little swimming, but a few are starting to move around. We gave them a little food, but only one seemed to notice, so we don't think they're quite ready to eat yet.

All of the levels in our tank (temperature, pH, ammonia, nitrite and nitrate) seem to be holding steady so far. Our nitrite level has been 1.0 consistently since we set up the tank, which had us worried at first. Nitrite measures some pollution in the water and isn't good for the fish, so we'd like it to be at 0, however, we can't find the cause of the raised level, so we haven't been able to bring it down. Water changes don't seem to have any impact. One of our advisors suggested that maybe there's some limestone in the pea gravel we used and that could be the cause. In any event, it doesn't seem to be effecting the alevin so far, so we're just keeping an eye on it.

All of the kids in the school are tracking what's happening in the tank. It has been really exciting to watch! We're trying to get pictures of the fish to publish, but it's very hard to capture those little guys.