Grunion hatch, release and a final celebration
By Chris Uyeda
Two weeks ago our team went down to Mission Beach to collect grunion eggs. Loyal followers of this blog may remember but for those catching up you can get all the details on our July 12th post. Since then the eggs have been incubating in our classroom, waiting to be big enough to “graduate”.
Today was that day. The first step was to take a look at the eggs under the microscope. When you look at a soon to be hatched grunion under a microscope two aspects stand out. First, the eye. It’s the most prominent feature in terms of size and color and there is something that happens when you look into the eye of any organism. The second is just how much fish is coiled into such a tiny space. Not surprising considering the unrecognizable mass of a handful of cells we saw two weeks ago was now a distinct fish.
It was an exhilarating moment filled with “oohs” and “aahs”. As students explored they were struck by all kinds of questions. Some thought they saw developing nerve endings, another pondered at the differences between the viable and unviable eggs, and one student even saw a beating heart!
Then it was time for the real excitement – hatching the grunion. In the wild, hatching is triggered by wave action. Grunion lay their egg in the sand during the highest tide. When the high tide returns (about two weeks later) the crashing waves signal to the fish it’s time to be “born”. To simulate this process, students put the eggs in a small dish of ocean water and started swirling.
At first nothing happened. And as with anything in nature you never can fully predict what will happen and there was a moment where we all though “Maybe this won’t work.” But within minutes the little fish started popping out of their eggs and you could hear the visceral excitement from students. As an educator, there is something very special about these moments. You don’t need to “teach” students what they are seeing or creatively find ways to pull out what they are thinking – it just explodes from them instinctively.
Once you figure out how to hatch a grunion it’s a bit addictive. So we spent a good 20 minutes hatching eggs, showing off our fish and feeling like proud grunion parents.
Since the future prospects of a baby grunion is bleak if they stay in a classroom, it was time to head the beach. We returned to the same beach we collected the eggs, waded out into the water, and released the fish back to the Pacific Ocean.
In many ways, the moment was a metaphor. Like the grunion eggs, our team has spent the last two weeks going through a transformation. Slowly growing, expanding, and preparing to search the ocean on their own.
After some high fives there was a unanimous vote among the crew to bury me in the sand. A side note to my fellow educators – if you want to know what your students really think of you, having them bury you in the sand is a pretty good exercise. Thankfully, I somehow managed to get on their good side. I also don’t think I’ve ever seen them work so hard or so well together as when they were covering me in 50 pounds of sand!
We returned to school for our final standup to reflect and share our biggest take aways from the program. The thoughts spanned the spectrum – a greater appreciation for the ocean, getting to know students they wouldn’t have otherwise, finding themselves, knowing the resources in their own back yard, and how the ocean works – and it was definitely a bittersweet moment. And then, like the grunion, they were set free.
OCEANS: San DIEGO 