Lessons of the first-time fish wrangler:
Shad eggs take about a day and a half to hatch.
A dead shad smells much worse than a live one.
When keeping 6,000 baby shad in a tank in an elementary school hallway, it is important to keep them cool.
"If the temperature isn't correct, they'll all die," said Morgan Powell, 10. "Which is horrible."
Powell and other fifth-graders at Bethesda's Westbrook Elementary spent this week raising tiny eggs to slightly less tiny "fry." Yesterday afternoon, they released their minuscule charges into the Potomac River.
For the students at Westbrook -- one of 23 area schools raising the fish -- it was a chance to participate in one of Washington's most ancient spring rituals: the migration and spawning of American shad.
These silvery fish, which usually weigh between three and six pounds, once teemed in the Potomac and other East Coast rivers. But shad populations declined because of heavy fishing and dams, which blocked the way to upstream spawning grounds.
Lately, however, the destruction of some dams and restocking programs have provided a boost.
Since 1995, the number of shad caught in spring population surveys of the Potomac has more than tripled. For nine years, schoolchildren from across the Washington region have been raising tiny shad and releasing them in the Potomac and Anacostia rivers.
The program increases the chance that the fry will grow into maturity because it protects them from such predators as minnows during their most vulnerable days.
Adults, of course, think the whole thing is educational.
"It raises their consciousness tremendously," said Sandy Burk, a volunteer who runs the shad program. Burk has written a book about the school effort, "Let the River Run Silver Again!" (2005).
The students said they're doing it for the fish.
Yesterday, Morgan and two other fifth-graders, Nicole Parina, 11, and Francine Groenhuijsen, 11, gave a PowerPoint presentation about the fish to kindergarten students. They showed off their fish tank's filtering mechanisms and held out a smelly dead adult shad in a newspaper bag.
They answered tough questions, refusing to sugarcoat the ways of nature.
"What would happen if the baby fish got sick?" one kindergartner asked.
"What would happen is they would maybe, probably, die," Morgan said.
Thankfully, though, not many of the ones at Westbrook died. A D.C. public school in the program had its power go out, Burk said, and all its shad eggs perished.
The girls explained why the shad had to be released so soon. Shad "imprint" on their home waters as they grow, they said, and keeping them too long might cause confusion when they returned to spawn.
"We want them to imprint on the Potomac River," said Francine. "We don't want them to look for the Westbrook shad tank." The fish were eventually dumped out of small cups and into the river below Great Falls.
Before heading off to wash away the dead shad smell, the girls said that it was astounding that their work might actually make a change.
"I'm quoting from what George Washington said," Morgan said. "He said the river was, like, silver with shad.
"It surprises me that we could actually do that" again, she said.
