Valley students examine pike with gusto

PALMER — Maybe it’s just an Alaska thing, but when it came time to cut into the pike during Friday’s fish dissection at Palmer Junior Middle School, few, if any, of the kids were squeamish.

And quite a few were actually kind of excited.

“Ours is pooping!” shouted a table in the back of Lesley Bunch’s class, the students clearly more entertained than grossed out.

“Mine drools out blood!” came a similarly entertained shout from closer to the front.

After they’d measured the fish with a ruler, the kids dangled them from a scale to record the weight. Then they tore out its ear bone and held it up to the light to see how old it was.

Finally it was time to cut. The kids — none of whom giggled even a little when told to start cutting at the “anal opening” — made a series of cuts that formed the shape of a capital “I” and opened their fish up like books. They pulled out the stomach and intestines.

Some kids found baby salmon in there. Others found what looked like bones.

“You guys have about one more minute with your fish, so if there’s anything you wanted to investigate you have one more minute,” Bunch told them.

Nathan Weber, a biologist with the Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association who was leading the dissection, encouraged that exploration.

“If you want to cut out its eye you can,” he said before stopping to show a pair of boys how to do it.

Clearly, the exercise was a fun day in science class. But Weber said there’s a point to it as well. Pike was chosen for a reason. Pike are an invasive species threatening native salmon populations in many Mat-Su lakes. These particular fish were caught in Shell Lake in the Skwentna area.

“We’ve been monitoring that system most recently since 2006,” Weber said.

He said eradicating pike is a long, tough, expensive project. They’re using gill nets and fishing lines and “any other means” short of poison.

But if you don’t fight back against the pike they’re capable of destroying salmon populations.

“If you don’t do anything it’s almost like you’re giving up on native species,” Weber said.

He said the kids’ data — the length and weight of the fish, and maybe even some data about their stomach contents — would be included in his own.

He said pike are voracious. They are relentless eaters of baby salmon that have also been known to eat everything from voles to ducklings, which means that opening up their stomachs can be kind of surprising.

“You never know what you’re going to find in there,” he said.

The baby salmon — smolt would be the technical term — that the kids found Friday looked like sockeyes. It was hard to tell, though, because their heads were digested.

Right about the time he was done talking the next class came in, ready to cut up some more fish. Bunch asked them to say high to Weber.

“Hi Nate!” they shouted before one kid followed up with, “How are you?”

“I’m good,” Weber replied cheerfully.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.