Mrs. Reid emailed us a couple of days ago and sounded rather worried about the fate of the alevins at the St.Andrews tank…  The water was murky, it was very difficult to see what was going on inside the tank and we couldn’t help thinking about last year’s disaster, when all the alevins died… Conrad, the janitor, had cleaned the pump which revealed a few eggs trapped in the impeller, had fitted a very ingenious filter and did a partial water change. Everything had been done by the book, so what could possibly go wrong?

A quick visit at the school yesterday afternoon revealed a tank full of very murky  and smelly water… Hardly any alevin could be seen over the mesh grid and the water quality was obviously going down quickly. So, today, drastic measures were needed! First, most of the water was siphoned out, the mesh was removed and we discovered hundreds of healthy alevins underneath but also a lot of debris like small chunks of eggs and dead alevins which had probably fallen victim of the impeller pump… All the alevins were then transferred into a bucket full of clean rain water, the tank was cleaned, the pump was fitted with a bottle type filter and the alevins were poured back into the half-full tank, making sure the pump outlet produced plenty of water movement and air bubbles. The battle might not be won yet as the rain water we used was 4ºC colder (6.5º) than the water in the tank and some fish may have been affected by the thermal shock. This is what the tank looks like now: