Utah students raise and release trout in hands-on learning program
Wednesday, May 7, the Uintah Elementary second-grade students gathered around the trout fingerlings, which were swimming in a tank in the classroom.
It's part of the national aquatic biology program, Trout in the Classroom, which provides a hands-on learning experience for school-age children as they raise native trout from fertilized eggs, then release them as fingerlings into local waterways.
In Utah, the program is a partnership between the national conservation organization Trout Unlimited, the Utah Division of Natural Resources, and local school teachers.
'The kids are so interested in observing and seeing all the changes that the trout go through in their development, and learning a lot about habitats and what trout need and how we can help them,' said second-grade teacher Ruth Hansen.
Artists hope 2034 Olympics, like their 2002 Olympic sculpture, will be a symbol of unity
Hansen shared that this is the fifth year that the class has joined the program. She noted that it looked different every time, adding that the trout seemed to grow bigger this year compared to the past.
'I would highly recommend it. The kids are so engaged. Every single kid is engaged with watching this and experiencing it,' she said. 'They have lots of questions and they learn all kinds of things, but it's all integrated. We did science, we did math, writing, talking to each other, social skills. It's great.'
David Leta the statewide coordinator for Trout in the Classroom, said he hopes it can help students develop a better appreciation and understanding of nature.
'It's just fun. It's rewarding. The excitement is just infectious, and it's great to see the kids learn new things — and to learn it by doing, rather than just having someone, a talking head, talking to them about it, or reading it in a book. They can actually experience it,' he said.
Leta said that it's a volunteer program, and he loves being a part of it to give back to the community and environment.
'I'm a fisherman myself, so I love it to see the fish population thrive in our streams and rivers, and I like to see the next generation of young people grow up to appreciate fish and learn how to fish and just enjoy the outdoors,' he said.
During the 2025-2025 school year, 72 Utah classes participated in the program, with 4,700 students joining in. Over 10,000 fertilized trout eggs were delivered to these classrooms in early January 2025 to be released this month.
To learn more about the organization and the programs it offers, visit the Utah Council of Trout Unlimited website.
Latest headlines:
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to ABC4 Utah.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Los Angeles Times
10-08-2025
- Los Angeles Times
Prepare to say a frond farewell to Los Angeles' palm trees
Call forth the mourners from far and wide. And remind them to bring their chainsaws. We gather to prepare ourselves to bid a frond farewell to Los Angeles' palm trees. Don't freak out. This isn't an alert about any wholesale dying of palms. Not all of them, anyway, and not right away. But Ecclesiastes got it right about everything having a season, 'a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.' The season — the long, long winning season — for so many of our palm trees is running its course. Our exotic, come-hither, haphazard forest is being slowly timed out. We stand at an inflection point for L.A., after the fires, in the grip of climate change, recalibrating our future right down to the roots. Literally to the roots. Uncounted thousands of trees burned in the fires. Thousands more are getting thinned out by disease and drought and age. How do we replace our geriatric urban forest with more and better trees? Original L.A. was not the forest primeval. It was a landscape of scrubby shrubs and chaparral and grasses. What native trees there were grew alongside water, which flowed abundantly, if seasonally, until we took over the land and dried up the waterways. Palm trees came to town with the missionaries, for religious ceremonies, and then, decades later, with the great PR sales pitch of Southern California being the 'American Mediterranean,' which demanded the right set dressing — palm trees. The City Beautiful movement of the 1910s and1920s and the glories of the 1932 Olympics stuck thousands of trees of all kinds into the ground to adorn public L.A. All they had to do was look good; to fret over drought or heat was treason. Angelenos' faith that pretty much anything could grow here was usually right. The unlikeliest tree cuttings from the world over were carried here, adapted and came to elbow out the locals. Thus, Los Angeles became a tree zoo. Now it's time to make it a tree ark, and not every species should make it aboard. Climate change changes cities. We can no longer afford freeloader trees, however glamorous. Palms suck down water like camels, but give back barely enough leafiness to shade a Hula-Hoop. Falling fronds can deliver a mean whack, and during fires, palms light up like a flare. The nonprofit TreePeople has been trying to prep us for this for years. Bryan Vejar is a master arborist who directs community forestry for TreePeople, and, yes, in fact, he does have a few thoughts on the topic, and this is the moment we need to hear them, so take it away, Mr. Vejar: 'Trees are not some cosmetic thing, some ornament. They're also critical infrastructure, like traffic signs and traffic lights. They have tremendous value for the health and safety of the community.' 'We should be planting trees that serve a greater range of ecological benefits. There's not just one clear answer. The trees we plant now have to be climate-adaptive for weather forecasts for 50 and 60 years.' 'Native trees also support local wildlife, specifically ones endemic to our geographical biome. Pollinators, nesting birds, migratory birds and other species rely on them.' 'Not a lot of trees check every box. You want trees that are very durable and very resilient, that can endure many different soil types in any given community.' All right, then. What's in, and what's out once we cart away old trees and/or plant new ones? Out: most palms. And don't replace them with something like crape myrtle, which is pretty but doesn't offer much shade for the space it takes up. Most eucalyptus, out. They're invasive below ground and tiki torches above. Sweet gums, out; They're also invasive, triggering allergies, and dropping nasty, spiky balls like alien spoor. (Some trees appear on a city-approved list, but TreePeople gives them a 'branches-down.') I share Vejar's loathing for the relentless 'tree of heaven,' the deciduous plant that is sometimes called a stinking sumac. You see it everywhere; it not only crowds out natives, it also poisons the soil to kill off the competition and ruins biodiversity. Its leaves can also kill your dog. If you see one in your garden, kill it before it kills us. Vejar's 'ins' include native oaks and some sycamores, black walnut trees, desert willows, drought-tolerant African sumac and Chinese pistache. Ficus trees scrub away air pollution and cast vast shade, something vital when an urban forest can lower temperatures by 10 or 20 degrees. Ideal, right? Yet cities planted them unwisely alongside sidewalks, which their mature roots now crack and split. 'The thing that makes it a workhorse for urban forests,' says Vejar, 'is also what makes cities have to pay out millions in lawsuits from people tripping, ADA violations and such.' So, suppose the palms do take their last bow? Which understudy is ready to step onstage as our new arboreal star? Oaks and sycamores are too generic. Orange trees? Memento mori. But the jacaranda — now there's beauty. Fast-growing, generous with shade, drought-tolerant and soil-forgiving. Bees and butterflies love them. And did I mention beautiful? That ultraviolet haze shimmering around a blossoming jacaranda delivers a moment of transcendent enchantment. So what if the fallen petals are sticky? It's a small toll paid to glory. Like a wad of gum dropped on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Boston Globe
31-07-2025
- Boston Globe
Today in History: Phelps sets Olympic medal record
In 1715, a fleet of Spanish ships carrying gold, silver, and jewelry sank during a hurricane off the east Florida coast; of some 2,500 crew members, more than 1,000 died. In 1775, 250 years ago, General George Washington ordered Major Benjamin Tupper to take 300 men and destroy Boston Light house. The men overwhelmed the British but the tides left them stranded on the island and vulnerable to British reinforcements. Nonetheless, the soldiers defeated the British a second time on the Little Brewster Island before returning to the mainland. In 1777, the 19-year-old Marquis de Lafayette received a commission as major general in the Continental Army by the Second Continental Congress. Advertisement In 1919, Germany's Weimar Constitution was adopted by the republic's National Assembly. In 1945, Pierre Laval, premier of the pro-Nazi Vichy government in France, surrendered to US authorities in Austria; he was turned over to France, which later tried and executed him. In 1957, the Distant Early Warning Line, a system of radar stations designed to detect Soviet bombers approaching North America, went into operation. In 1964, the US lunar probe Ranger 7 took the first close-up images of the moon's surface. In 1971, Apollo 15 crew members David Scott and James Irwin became the first astronauts to use a lunar rover on the surface of the moon. In 1972, vice-presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton withdrew from the Democratic ticket with George McGovern following disclosures that Eagleton had received electroshock therapy to treat clinical depression. Also that year, Massachusetts Correction Officer Alfred Baranowski and Correction Officer James Souza were shot and killed during an escape attempt by a convicted murderer from the Norfolk Prison. The state's maximum-security facility in Lancaster was named after them. In 1973, Delta Air Lines Flight 723 undershot the runway in Logan International Airport amid low visibility and collided with a sea wall. The crash, the worst commercial aviation disaster in New England, would eventually take the lives of all 89 people on board. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) in Moscow. In 2012, at the Summer Olympics in London, swimmer Michael Phelps won his 19th Olympic medal, becoming the most decorated Olympian of all time. (He would finish his career with 28 total Olympic medals, 23 of them gold.) Advertisement In 2020, a federal appeals court overturned the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, saying the judge who oversaw the case didn't adequately screen jurors for potential biases. (The Supreme Court reimposed the sentence in 2022.)
Yahoo
25-07-2025
- Yahoo
‘They didn't discover this land, there were people that lived here,': Shoshone Tribal Elder tells the untold side of the Pioneer Day story
SALT LAKE CITY () — As Pioneer Day celebrations take place across the Beehive State, a Shoshone Tribe elder spoke out about the untold history of pioneers settling in native lands in Utah. Darren Parry, former Chairman of the Shoshone Tribe and devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, spoke to in an exclusive interview Thursday about the complexities of one of Utah's most popular holidays. 'On one hand, I'm Shoshone… and on the other hand, I'm a sixth-generation Latter-day Saint,' Parry said. 'I absolutely love and honor the pioneers who came, but they didn't discover this land. There were people that lived here.' Two sides to the pioneer story According to the LDS church, as many as 70,000 Saints migrated to Utah and the surrounding areas between 1847 and 1868. 'The records of those who made this trek describe… episode[s] of disease, danger, bravery, and miracles,' the church's website reads. 'You have this state holiday when only one side is celebrated and told,' Parry told Parry says telling the Indigenous people's story is not to replace Pioneer heritage and history, but to be a companion to it. He strongly discourages harboring hard feelings of anger towards anyone based on history, but rather encourages people to ask, 'Is there another side to the story?' In a National Park Service historic resource study, the Mormon Pioneers were part of the idea and the realization of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, and that they 'contributed to the growth of white supremacy in the west.' 'I cannot separate that story from the broader one. The story of Manifest Destiny, a belief that drove expansion across this continent at the cost of Indigenous lives, lands, and cultures,' Parry said. 'I think a lot of people don't look at the… problematic side of their ancestors coming here because it was never taught,' he said. The Bear River Massacre According to Parry, before the arrival of Mormon Pioneers, the Shoshone Tribe's home base was centered in Cache Valley, or 'Sihiviogoi' in the Shoshone language, meaning 'Willow River.' Over time, more and more pioneers came and settled in the valley. By 1856, thousands of Pioneers had settled there and had already begun to deplete its natural resources. The late BYU historian, Harold Schindler, wrote in 2012 that tensions began to grow between settlers and the Shoshone, who, 'faced with dwindling lands and food sources, had resorted to theft in order to survive.' 'The saints began writing letters to Salt Lake for somebody to come take care of the 'Indian Problem,'' Parry told adding that the letters eventually made it to U.S. Soldiers at Fort Douglas. According to Schindler, on January 29, 1863, soldiers from Fort Douglas attacked a Shoshoni camp on the Bear River near modern-day Preston, Idaho, killing nearly 300 men, women, and children. However, many Shoshone believe the number to be closer to 400, making it the largest massacre of Indigenous people in the history of the U.S. Healing from 'generational trauma' In an LDS Church history essay, historians detail that while Indigenous peoples in some instances captured horses and burned prairie grass to divert bison away from Latter-day Saint hunters, they were often hospitable and sometimes offered to push handcarts or help the migrants ford rivers. Within 10 years of the Bear River Massacre, Shoshone and Pioneers began to interact with one another, Parry said. 'In May of 1873, 102 Shoshones were baptized members of the LDS Church in the Bear River. The same river that, 10 years earlier, saw the destruction of our people.' According to Shoshone oral history, tribal leaders began having visions and manifestations about a god among the Mormon Church, leading many to join the faith; However, Parry acknowledges that material benefits and security may have been a factor in so many Shoshone joining the church. He concluded, saying, 'We just want to acknowledge the past and allow us to heal from this generational trauma that's existed from 1847 on.' Latest headlines: Two fires ignite near freeway in Salt Lake City, fireworks 'unlikely' cause Trump targets disaster mitigation funds, raising risks in future crises Trump and Powell feud explodes in public White House mulling a rare tool to block spending without Congress: What to know GOP leaders submarined by Epstein uproar Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Solve the daily Crossword
