When Adam Frederick leaves home at 5:30 a.m., it's so dark he can't see the Cactoctin mountains humped up to the west. From Woodsboro, Maryland, up on the northern edge of the state, 20 miles below Pennsylvania, he drives south and east past farms, small towns and the new suburbs now spreading out through the rolling October countryside of the state's central plateau. He's got a large chunk of the state to cover before he comes home tonight. In his work year, this is the longest day.
Seventy miles later the sun is up when he pulls into a mega mall on the outskirts of Annapolis and switches into a gray van driven by Jackie Takacs, one of his co-workers in the Maryland Sea Grant Extension Program. Soon they are arcing across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, squinting into the southeastern light to see if any watermen are out fishing for late season crabs or early season oysters. Heading south along route 50, they pass more farms, the large corn and soybean farms of the mostly flat middle Eastern Shore of Maryland. At Cambridge they cross the mile-wide Choptank River, one of the major spawning rivers in the Bay for striped bass.
Their job today is to haul young striped bass fingerlings back across the Bay and deliver them to six high schools scattered across north central Maryland. Frederick calls their project Aquaculture in Action, and he began it in 1997, soon after he came to work for Sea Grant as an Education Specialist. The plan behind the project: students will raise the fish in their classrooms, release them back in the Bay at the end of the school year – and learn a lot of science in the process. If the students learn well, the fish make it through the school year alive.
Frederick is gambling with fish by betting on Maryland students – and he's looking at some long odds. According to studies by the National Science Board, not many American students are taking science seriously. The U.S. now ranks 17th among developed nations in the proportion of college students majoring in science, and less than half the students now enrolled in college science classes are native born. For critics like Fareed Zakaria, writing in The Washington Post, all these trends add up to one truth: "Americans don't do science anymore."
Adam Frederick still does science, however, and he is using these striped bass to test a hypothesis about American schools. He claims American students can still do science and do it well – if they, like working scientists, are presented with real problems to solve and questions to answer.
Three miles east of Cambridge, Takacs swings a sharp right onto the grounds of the Horn Point Laboratory, an 800-acre site of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) that sits on a bluff above the Choptank River. Driving down the arrow-straight, tree-lined entrance lane, they pass offices, research buildings, and seagrass ponds, then park next to a long, low-lying metal building with a greenhouse running along one side. This is the laboratory's finfish hatchery and the birthplace of Frederick's would-be pedagogical fingerlings.
The U.S. now ranks 17th among developed nations in the proportion of college students majoring in science.
Inside Frederick makes a quick tour of three large blue 400-gallon tanks, peering down at tiny stripers alternately gliding and darting about their small watery worlds, the only worlds they've ever known. "Hey, they look good. They're pretty," he tells Andy Lazur, the hatchery operator. With 11 tanks in all, Lazur's hatchery kingdom looks like a cross between a big garage and a small barn. It is wet underfoot, and noisy with the constant sibilation of running water and hissing compressors and murmuring pumps – all the godlike, but man-made machinery necessary to create these worlds and keep them running.
With his wiry frame Frederick has a hefty, low-end voice, the kind that could sell well on television and radio – and he has clearly sold his partners on this project. Tall, southern and soft spoken with a Ph.D. in finfish aquaculture, Lazur has agreed to release 150 of his fish into the keeping of high school students. Takacs is already hustling up fish nets and plastic bags and cardboard boxes, the tools of the day. She's ready to push fish out the door and start chauffeuring them around the state.
The fish in these tanks are the offshoots of some big stripers who swam up the Choptank the previous spring – only to find Lazur and his assistants waiting for them in a small open boat. Hot to spawn and head back out to the mainstem and the ocean beyond, the stripers were, instead, stunned by a literal bolt out of the blue. Lazur swung a short boom out from the boat, lowered several dangling electrodes into the water and unleashed lightning shocks strong enough to knock any passing stripers senseless and send them floating to the surface.
Back at the hatchery, Lazur would pick out stunned males and females who are already leaking sperm and eggs, then revive their sex drives with hormone injections. With hatchery spawning, the readiness is all. When they're back in the mood, Lazur turns his revved-up captives loose in a small, warmed-up tank, usually two males with one larger female, and waits to see what happens. The result: a scene that's pretty close to – and perhaps even better than – the belly-rubbing frenzy the stripers were looking for out there in the Choptank. And voila! – two days later, lots of new fish larvae are floating in the tank. These fish-love sessions work better than Mother Nature's, begetting more larvae per adult than any wild spawning in the river would.
For the small fry, early life in a hatchery tank, while not as scenic or adventuresome as life in the river, is certainly safer and healthier. No predators around to gulp down little larvae; instead, leaning over them, the towering figure of Lazur, first cause and prime mover in their brief lives, stopping to feed them and keep their world bubbling along with clean, waste-free, oxygen-rich water.
Their world suddenly gets smaller as Frederick, taking dead aim, stabs a long-handled fish net down at a school of stripers sliding around the bottom. He hoists the dripping net and stares at it intently. "There are a couple red marks on a few of them around the gill," he tells Takacs. They both count fish aloud as they scoop 25 fingerlings into water-filled plastic bags. This is how the fish will travel the state, floating in bags and stored in styrofoam boxes and plastic coolers, the same kind you fill with ice in the summer to chill a six pack or carry home a legal-size, freshly-caught striper.
The problem with trucking fish in bags is keeping them alive, and the solutions are oxygen, temperature and timing. Before sealing the fish bags, Frederick opens the valve on an oxygen tank and pumps in plenty of air, turning each fish bag into a bulging fish balloon with enough oxygen to keep 25 fingerlings alive through a long day. That's a taste of the problems teachers and students will face back at their schools.
Frederick calls his approach project-based science, but it's also called problem-solving science. To come up with solutions, students and teachers will have to tackle a slew of research questions just as Lazur and other working scientists do in commercial hatcheries and university labs around the country. That's a lot to handle for teachers and students who supposedly don't do much science anymore.
Takacs slides the last cooler into her big grey Odyssey van and Frederick slams the rear door down. By 9:30, they are back on the road and Lazur's little stripers are headed north with no notion of what lies ahead. Frederick, however, knows what's at stake. He's betting some of his reputation and all of Lazur's striped bass to test a hypothesis about how much high school teachers and students can handle. If the experiment works, the fish live – and students learn more science. If it doesn't, a lot of fish start dying in high schools all around the state.
The pioneer in a pensive moment: Bob Foor-Hogue and the aquaculture kingdom where he sometimes goes tank swimming. The fish-raising projects he and his students created at South Carroll High School became the model for Aquaculture in Action, a program that helps teachers around the state adapt his hands-on, problem-solving approach to science education. Says Foor-Hogue, "My students have done extraordinary things." Photograph by Michael W. Fincham
In 1990, a teacher named Bob Foor-Hogue created his first fish tank system by setting up several 55-gallon barrels in the back of his second-floor chemistry classroom at South Carroll High School. One barrel held lava rocks for a primitive filter and the others held tilapia, a fish popular with professional aquaculture operators.
Aquaculture, he immediately discovered, was constant problem solving. After he flooded the first floor classrooms below him several times, his school administrators solved that problem for him by moving his operation to a greenhouse out back. When he quickly filled up the greenhouse with tank systems, they gave him a huge shed at the back of the school that was once used for teaching tractor repair to Carroll County students. He and his students knocked out a wall, built a glass-walled classroom along one side, and then proceeded to fill up their new space with more fish tanks.
Foor-Hogue was not the first to bring fish into Maryland high schools – the Maryland Department of Agriculture had tried sending tanks and tilapia to a number of vocational ag teachers as a way to popularize aquaculture – but he was, it seems, the first to use aquaculture as a tool for teaching science.
It began when he created a course called Science Research. The core concept was project-based science and the project he chose was aquaculture. The first fish he tried was tilapia, because it was adaptable and widely available from professional aquaculture operations that raised the fish for the supermarket trade. His long-term goal, however, was to raise striped bass – not to sell them, but to release them back into the Chesapeake Bay.
As a younger man, Foor-Hogue saw firsthand the great declines in the Chesapeake ecosystem. To earn money for college, he and his brothers worked as commercial crabbers out of Kent Island. Several days after Tropical Storm Agnes dumped record rainfalls throughout the Chesapeake watershed in 1972, he motored out to check on his crab pots, timing his trip for slack tide when the water starts to clear. At low tide he usually had to turn his motor off because the grass beds were so thick. But now he peered down and saw no grass beds. He motored three miles south along Kent Island and never had to cut his motor. There were no seagrasses.
It was a moment he never forgot. During the next two decades, he saw seagrasses and oysters nearly disappear and striped bass decline, leading to a controversial moratorium on the catching and selling of the fish in Maryland. When he dove into aquaculture, he went in deep, as he always does, because it was personal. He wanted to raise striped bass to re-release them into the Bay.
Project-based science works on a need-to-know basis, according to Foor-Hogue.
If his students bought into a project like restoring the Chesapeake Bay, they might also buy into raising striped bass. If they did, what would they need to know?
How do you keep fish tanks up and running, water clean and oxygenated, fish healthy and growing? How do you feed the fish, measure their growth and get them back in the water alive? His students would have to solve a lot of problems, and the answers would come from biology, ecology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, engineering and computer science.
In theory, his project-based science was an advanced course, building on what students have already learned in traditional high school courses. In practice, Foor-Hogue is not a huge fan of most of those courses, despite years teaching biology and chemistry, both mainstream science and Advanced Placement science, the high-prestige courses that are supposed to help students boost their college prospects.
Are all these AP courses the answer the country is looking for? Do they bode well for turning out more American scientists? Not according to Foor-Hogue. Memory work for test taking, he calls them. "The beauty and elegance of science get lost in all the facts," he says. As a result a lot of potential scientists may also be lost. "We may produce people who are more literate," he argues, "but we are not going to produce many scientists with AP."
Science, for Foor-Hogue, is not facts – you can look those up. Science is problem solving. That's what makes it personal for his students. "It's not how much you memorize," he told them, "but how you are able to use what you've learned." Getting his own aquaculture operation up and running, for example, was a project in itself, and his students went to work looking up facts and formulas and, piece by piece, solving most of his technical problems.
And they helped find money. Once they bought into his schemes and dreams, he put them to work writing funding proposals so they could afford even more tanks and pumps and piping. Over the last decade, the school has landed 50 grants, he says, many of them written by his students.
How much of this student buy-in came from his projects? And how much from his personality? With his passion and his peculiarities, Foor-Hogue was always popular with students. How many teachers came to class dressed like Einstein? Or like an alchemist? Or like a man named Nobel who wanted to invent dynamite. He wore his hair, now graying, in a long pony tail. He sometimes wore a beard and always had a bushy moustache. Then he added an earring.
When students – and teachers – talked about him, the first sentence that popped out of their mouths was: "Foor-Hogue is crazy." He was, after all, known to go swimming in his fish tanks. How many teachers tried that?
There was, of course, more than madness to his method. He kept his hair long just to irritate people, he says, but the rest of his act was aimed at keeping everybody alert in their seats. "The whole thing about the nutty professor has always worked to my advantage," he admits. "I never want to be equated as an average teacher." And the way to be well above average was to have fun. "When I think of my best teachers, they challenged me," he says, "but they also made education fun."
With his growing aquaculture empire, Foor-Hogue was becoming famous in the teaching community. He won honors like Maryland Science Teacher of the Year, the Presidential Award for Excellence, the Milliken Foundation National Educator Award.
Had he discovered, by accident or design, the secret to successful science teaching?
Foor-Hogue was invited to give dozens of presentations, and teachers began dropping by for site visits. One of them was Adam Frederick, a young biology teacher at nearby Walkersville High School.
Frederick saw the problem. "Look around the state," he says. "There's only one Foor-Hogue." Let's call the problem the Foor-Hogue singularity.
Could you bottle his approach and sell it to other teachers? Especially to new science teachers who were trying to find their way in a profession that focused on teaching for test taking? Or to experienced teachers who were facing burnout? Or thinking of quitting? If you couldn't clone a Foor-Hogue, could you codify his tactics?
Frederick, like Foor-Hogue, saw science as problem solving. When he went to work as an Education Specialist with Maryland Sea Grant Extension, his job was to develop programs and partnerships connecting the University and the state's teaching community, partnerships that could help improve science teaching. One of his first projects: try to solve the Foor-Hogue singularity.
He drove out to visit Foor-Hogue in his aquaculture kingdom. His huge, garage-like space now held 13 major fish tanks and scattered aquaria. In a busy year his students were raising up to 20 species of fish as well as mussels and turtles. They were routing wastewater from the fish tanks out to a greenhouse to grow seagrasses. How do you replicate this kind of setup – on a small scale, at least – at other schools around the state?
It was clear that a lot of the students were hooked on solving the mystery. If the fish were going to get well, students would have to help.
Frederick's proposal: a program he wanted to call Aquaculture in Action. Maryland Sea Grant Extension would work with Foor-Hogue to design and organize week-long workshops for science teachers. They would cover the basics, build a tank system with each new teacher, teach them how to look for funding. They would even bring them the fish. He got a typical Foor-Hogue response. "Let's do it," he said. "Let's start tomorrow."
They started in 1997 by writing a funding grant and a working manual on how to build tanks, raise fish and bring students into project-based science. In 1998, with funding from the Chesapeake Bay Trust and Sea Grant Extension, they brought a dozen teachers over to South Carroll High School and went to work. Every other summer since they've re-staged the workshop. With Frederick as master of ceremonies and Foor-Hogue as master teacher, the new recruits get to build their own tanks and tour the research hatcheries at Horn Point and at the Center for Marine Biotechnology in Baltimore.
Every October, Adam Frederick and Jackie Takacs fill up their water bags and coolers with Andy Lazur's striped bass and hit the road with hope and trepidation. The singularity problem remains. You can't boil the experience of a decade down to a one-week workshop. Aquaculture is problem solving, and their new teachers and students will have to solve problems they've never seen before.
When the new stripers came to Wootton High School in Rockville, it looked like they were going to die pretty quickly. Judy Parsons, a calm veteran with 30 years experience, was soon nervous. A new recruit to striped bass aquaculture, she had hustled to get her tanks ready. She set up a good salt balance, got her water temperature right on the money, and tested for pH levels. Her biofilters were ready with bacteria that were supposed to break down ammonia and nitrites, two of the waste products of fish.
As soon as Adam Frederick walked in, lugging his fish cooler, she went to work with her students, trying to acclimate the water-bagged stripers to their brand new tank. Within a day the stripers started getting sick.
Parsons called Frederick. She told him the fish looked sick, and they began working the problem. The fish, she told him, were floating near the top of the water, struggling to breathe. According to her reading these were some of the classic symptoms of fish under stress. The result was a teacher under stress. This was her first foray with stripers in the classroom, and it was not going well.
She called Frederick again. "We were changing 20 percent of the water," says Parsons, and the fish were coming apart." Now the fish had lesions, and the teacher seemed to be coming apart. "I was thinking, oh my God, I've got a flesh-eating bacteria," she says. "I thought I had Pfiesteria
She called Frederick nearly every day now, and then Andy Lazur down at the Horn Point hatchery. She went online, searching and downloading articles from science journals. The nitrite levels were climbing. Every time her students stuck their test sticks in the water, they turned deep purple. The fish, Frederick feared, were toast. It was clear by now that one of the bacteria in the biofilter was not kicking in and cleaning out the nitrites.
It was also clear that a lot of the students were hooked on solving the mystery. They were clearly upset and kept asking Parsons why the fish were so sick. This wasn't a problem in a textbook or in a river miles away. These fish were getting sick in a water tank sitting in the back of their classroom. If they were going to get well, students would have to help with researching the literature and reworking the water system.
Some mysteries are solved but never completely explained. Students and teacher decided that the culprit was nitrobacter, the bacteria that is supposed to decompose nitrites. Answers, in science, always lead to questions. Why do nitrobacter populations sometimes grow more slowly than predicted? So slowly they can't keep up with the waste from 25 tiny, four-inch fish. Questions don't always lead to answers.
Parsons and her students tried a 20 percent water change, and then 50 percent. A water change in a fish tank can be a tricky, time-consuming maneuver. As they drain off the old water (and its overload of nitrites), they have to add new water that is warm enough, salty enough and dechlorinated enough to keep the fish from stressing out even more.
The second change was the charm. The solution to pollution is (sometimes) dilution. With new water, the fish began moving around again, instead of clinging to the surface and sucking air. When nitrobacter finally kicked off a population explosion, nitrite levels began dropping to acceptable levels. Fish are incredible, thought Parsons. Within three days they were back to a semblance of normal life in a fish tank world.
Her students, by now, had worked through some real-world science. The near-death episode made a convert out of Parsons and a lot of her students. Several students from her Advanced Placement courses applied for in-school internships to work another year with the next batch of fish. "These kids learned so much about real-life application." says Parsons. "They have to know the nitrogen cycle on the AP test, and the kids who were working with these fish and trying to keep them alive, they understood the issues of nitrites. No question about that."
Over three decades of teaching, she has seen her field swing away from classic descriptive biology towards a stronger focus on molecular biology. Hands-on, project-based programs like environmental education and Aquaculture in Action, she believes, help recapture some of the excitement of the old biology.
She can see the response even in her students' basic data-gathering work. To weigh and measure the fish, they learn how to anesthetize fish with clove oil, giving them a 30-second window to work in. "These kids are never going to get an opportunity to handle fish like this again," she says. "First when they put them to sleep, they think they've killed the fish." Then the fish wake up, and so do many of the students. "They love it. Not only that: they are amazed."
Over the course of their rookie year with striped bass, Parsons and her students lost only three fish. Two died during the October crisis. Another died later from leaping out of the tank.
The rest returned home in style to the Eastern Shore. In May, Parsons and twenty students rode a rattling school bus for three hours from Rockville to Bishop's Head, Maryland where the Chesapeake Bay Foundation holds weekend field trips for teachers and their students. Their stripers got a smoother ride. Needing an oxygen supply for the long trip, they cruised down in the back seat of an air-conditioned car with an aerator plugged into the cigarette lighter.
Out in the wetlands along Fishing Bay, on a sliver of land that points south toward Tangier Sound, Parsons and her students sent 23 stripers sliding out to feed and fend for themselves in the food-rich waters of the middle Chesapeake.
Over the course of the year Foor-Hogue, the master teacher, lost more. Five of his stripers died at South Carroll High School. Several leapt unseen out of their tank, several died when a pump was accidentally turned off. The perpetual educator, Foor-Hogue taught his students how to dissect fish, take blood samples, remove organs and analyze tissue. He turned each death into a teachable moment.
Twenty of his fish survived, and on a cloudy day in May they leave Carroll County the way they came – in coolers and plastic trash cans. Their chauffeur is Foor-Hogue with one of his students, Mike Steel, riding shotgun. Frederick and other students follow in separate cars. This is no funeral procession, sliding somberly through red lights and stop signs with headlights lit in the middle of the day.
Think of it as a baptismal procession. Foor-Hogue calls it the best day of the school year. His students are going to release their tank-grown fish out into Chesapeake Bay. For the stripers, now nearly a foot long, it will be total submersion baptism and the beginning of a new life in a larger world. For the students, it will be a communal event. At Sandy Point Park, they are meeting up with Doug Stransky's students from Randallstown High School, a predominately black school in Baltimore County.
Driving south in his black, four-wheel drive Cherokee, Foor-Hogue starts worrying that his stripers, raised for part of the year in a chilly greenhouse, won't look as big as Stransky's. He's heard reports that Stransky has stripers that are 20-inchers. "He had them in warm water inside," he tells Steel, "so their metabolism would have been double what ours were."
Processions like these head out every May and early June from dozens of schools in Maryland. Since the first summer workshop with a dozen teachers, Adam Frederick and Jackie Takacs have spread their Aquaculture in Action program, with its tanks and pipes and problem-solving projects, to 41 schools, including an elementary school, a middle school, a high school in Pennsylvania and another in West Virginia. In buses and vans, pickup trucks and station wagons and the back seats of air-conditioned cars, striped bass and bluegills and rainbow trout go riding to their reward.
Just north of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, Frederick stands on a dock at Sandy Point Park, taking pictures of Foor-Hogue's fish-release ceremony. He wants to hook more teachers into his program and pictures might help. They'll go into his newsletter and up on his Aquaculture in Action web site, a resource for the network of teachers he's already got enrolled and an ongoing advertisement for signing up more schools.
Frederick clicks off some digital frames of Foor-Hogue lying flat on his stomach, hanging over the edge of a dock. He's holding a cooler half open beneath him and sloshing some warmer, saltier Bay water into the cooler. Inside five small stripers are trying to swim circles in a rectangular world.
"Wow, they're going to take off," says Frederick, trying to get some more frames before the fish are gone.
"No they're not," says Foor-Hogue. "I'm going to put some more water in." He can't believe how warm the water is. His stripers, used to the cool waters of a Carroll County greenhouse, seem to be acclimating well enough to this sea change in their lives.
"Their final swim," says Foor-Hogue, thinking of all the time and work he and his students have put in with these fish. "They've been swimming in circles for months – the endless swim to nowhere."
Now they have somewhere to go. A few years in the Bay, then perhaps the long swim down the Bay and up the coast to Maine. Stripers born in the Chesapeake have made it that far before turning around and heading home to spawn. At a foot long, these school-raised stripers have no major predators in the Bay, except fishermen with their nets and fishing lines and scientists with their electroshock prods. The ocean is another story.
One by one, the stripers head out. Kathleen McClellan, a senior, stands in the water guiding them over the lip of the cooler. Kevin Weeks and Mike Steel, two juniors, carry the rest of the coolers down from the car. Guys are too cool to wade in the water so they work on the dock, pouring buckets of warm Bay water into the coolers, getting the rest of the fish ready.
Foor-Hogue peeks in one of Stransky's tall fish cans and confirms his suspicions. Stransky has 20-inchers, no doubt about it, beautiful and big enough to eat. The student, for this year at least, has bested his teacher. Stransky, it turns out, took his first two chemistry courses from Foor-Hogue. And he learned his fish-rearing techniques from the Aquaculture in Action workshop and web site. He's a physicist, not a biologist, but with that kind of training he's been able to raise some monster fish with his students.
The fish have somewhere to go and so, perhaps, do the students. Foor-Hogue and Frederick have helped steer students into aquaculture, biology, oceanography, aeronautical engineering and environmental science and policy. Kathleen McClellan, the girl in the water guiding the stripers, is headed to the Air Force Academy. Doug Stransky, of course, went into science teaching.
Another girl in shorts, one of Stransky's students, wades out with a trash can, and the two girls together keep guiding the big fish into the Bay. Frederick takes more pictures and then Stransky starts clicking away also. Soon the students start playing to the cameras. A girl holds up a striper: "Say bye-bye to the camera." She kisses it and slips it underwater. "Bye-bye."
Foor-Hogue, the godfather, has no prayers for the occasion but he does have a hymn. "We should do a chorus of "'Born Free,'" he says. That dates him, of course, because none of his students know what he's talking about.
Another fish slides out of the can, looks around, then darts away looking for dinner, and Foor-Hogue tries humming the duhnt-duhnt-duhnt-duhnt theme from Jaws.
That dates him too, so he shuts up and starts taking pictures.
