Swimming in a tank just inside the door, nearly 100 baby paddlefish have made a classroom at St. Aloysius High School their home for the semester.

Raising the fish from eggs to the length of a finger is a semester long project for students in Erin Blanche’s science classes at St. Al. The students are tasked with making sure the quality of the water is correct to keep the fish alive, feeding them and doing everything necessary to keep the fish alive.

Called the Native Fish in the Classroom project, the experiment is a partnership with Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

“They really started this around January,” Blanche said. “We let them catch fish and bring them in. We had little bream, a white perch and little bass. They do that to get the bacteria levels right. We introduce larger fish into the tank and then we test different parameters. We are trying to get the water levels correct, so we have a good number of bacteria for when we get the fry.”

The fish eggs and new fry are more susceptible poor water quality so getting the levels right before introducing the eggs is paramount to the success of the experiment.

The project is mostly the work of the students in Blanche’s environmental science class, but students in each of her science classes have gotten involved. After spending the first month of the semester getting the water levels correct, the students joined 13 other schools at Booker Fowler Fish Hatchery in Woodworth, Louisiana March 7 to fertilize and collect their eggs for the project.

Biologists at the hatchery collected the eggs from spawning fish and then the students were tasked with handling the fertilization process.

The eggs hatched two weeks ago and now the students have to try and keep them alive until they are viable to be released into the Mississippi River at the end of the semester.

“This year we have had more fish survive to this point than every before, so I am pretty excited,” Blanche said. “The kids have been very interested. They will beat me to class and want to start checking the water quality. We check water quality every day.”

The students test for different properties in the water including the ammonia, PH and dissolved oxygen levels and then make adjustments if the levels are too high. This year they added plants to the tank to try and balance out some of the properties in the water. They also have to make sure the water remains at the correct temperature to simulate river conditions.

Paddlefish can eventually grow to be around 5 feet in length, but by the end of the semester they will be only a few inches long.

“We are teaching them everything from about water quality to the relationship between the bacteria and the fish,” Blanche said. “We want them to learn about the structure of the fish and their feeding behaviors. Also, our biggest thing is we want to develop good stewards of our environment.”

Blanche has been doing the project for four years, but this is her first time doing it with students at St. Al.