by Abigail Ward and Peggy Harte
Salmon face many stressors that significantly reduce their survival. Persistent challenges include habitat degradation, predation, pollution, and climate change that threaten already at-risk populations. Conservation efforts in California engage with the complexity of these stressors, yet in recent years, a new threat has emerged to salmon restoration in the Central Valley. The absence of a seemingly inconspicuous nutrient, vitamin B1 or thiamine, has been impeding restoration. The gravity of this situation becomes apparent when considering the analogous struggles of salmon populations in the Baltic Sea and Great Lakes regions, emphasizing the global ramifications of this emerging threat (Balk et al., 2016).
Thiamine deficiency complex (TDC) was first documented in California salmon in 2020 when hatcheries in the Central Valley began noticing apparent lethargy, corkscrew swimming, and high mortality rates in their juvenile Chinook (Mantua et al., 2021). As researchers from UC Davis, NOAA, CDFW, and beyond sought to understand the causes and impacts of this vitamin deficiency, we saw an opportunity to engage youth in authentic scientific research.
In fall 2021 the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences began collaborating with the Center for Community and Citizen Science (CCCS) to launch our Spinning Salmon in the Classroom program, where high school students in Glenn, Tehama, and Colusa counties joined a 50+ member research team working to understand how TDC affects California’s Central Valley salmon. This program has since expanded to five counties, engaging over 1,800 high school students and their teachers. This collaboration has led to many educational and scientific opportunities, allowing students to participate in collecting high quality data for scientific studies, teachers to receive professional development support, and promoting direct interaction between students and university and agency scientists.
Building the Program
As researchers across the United States investigated the emergence of thiamine deficiency in California, a team from the Center for Watershed Sciences and Center for Community and Citizen Science at UC Davis, NOAA Fisheries, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, developed an observation protocol and lesson sequence for the CDFW Classroom Aquarium Education Program. This program was developed to help gather data on thiamine deficiency during early salmon life stages. Students’ data is used to quantify thiamine dependent early life stage mortality to calculate the concentration responsible for acute mortality in California Chinook salmon. Data submitted by students in this program is vital to understanding the effective concentration (EC50) of thiamine needed for fall run juvenile Chinook in the Central Valley, information not previously known (Fig. 1).
Each participating classroom receives an aquarium and 30-35 fall run Chinook salmon eggs from Feather River hatchery untreated with thiamine supplementation. The classrooms then submit regular observations on mortality and behavior related to the symptomatic expression of TDC as the fish develop (Fig. 2). This mirrors thiamine-dependent mortality experiments at UC Davis, attempting to understand this same concept for our other salmon runs in the Central Valley. Throughout the program, students learn about the scientific method, data collection, and experimental design as they engage with the scientific practices aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). In addition to lessons in the program, students receive hands-on learning experiences through field trips, including the final release of the fish into the local watershed at the end of the program (Fig. 3).
Engagement with Researchers
After the pilot year of this program, we realized the great benefits of connecting students to scientific researchers on our team. Introducing students to a scientific community helped them realize the importance of interdisciplinary science and allowed them to ask questions and receive real time answers. Their questions helped show that science is not done alone when answers often had to be given by several researchers, each with a different area of expertise. While participating in this program, students and teachers communicate with researchers through email Q&A, classroom visits, and field trips (Fig. 3 & 3). Each classroom is assigned a specific researcher with applicable backgrounds and expertise pertaining to their taught subjects. This allows for direct and open communication while also removing barriers between the classroom and researchers. The benefits of engagement often go both ways, with students’ insightful questions sparking new lines of scientific inquiry for researchers.
A Focus on Underserved Youth
During the pilot year, classrooms were recruited from College Opportunity Program GEAR UP, servicing first generation college bound students. In years 2-3 the program expanded to additional counties to engage students in continuation high schools, juvenile halls and deaf-hard of hearing programs. Resources for classroom engagement (https://sites.google.com/ucdavis.edu/salmonintheclassroomresources/home) centered on creating access for students often underserved by participatory science programs. We aim to explore ways professional development for educators and youth education programming could improve STEM learning and deepen students’ exploration of a range of college and career paths.
Community and Citizen Science focuses on how people who wouldn’t traditionally qualify as “scientists” are taking up tools of science to address environmental problems, locally, regionally, and globally. Traditional power structures in science need to be disrupted to include more voices, more sources of knowledge, more ways of thinking about environmental problems, no more so than youth. CCCS has recruited teachers working with student populations who are often the least likely to have had authentic environmental stewardship programming and have worked over the last year to refine and revise student and teacher supports for these populations. We built in additional opportunities for student voice to be brought to the forefront by designing resources and opportunities for outreach. Engaging under-resourced students and systems in our region, this program focused on lessons using Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to support students as they begin to see themselves as having power to advocate within their own community.
Next Steps
Year three of our Spinning Salmon in the Classroom program was completed at the end of February, with over 370 student observations and 120 student questions submitted. We seek to expand this program to new schools and classrooms forming novel and exciting ways of engagement and inclusion. The data collected by these students has given our research team a new understanding of thiamine dependent mortality in California Chinook and their data will soon be published within our juvenile mortality model in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) (Fig. 1). We are excited for the future of this program and to learn more of how engagement in scientific research can benefit students in the Central Valley.
Author affiliations: Abigail Ward, Assistant Specialist, UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences; Peggy Harte, M.Ed., Youth Education Program Manager, UC Davis Center for Community and Citizen Science
Further Readings
Balk, L., Hägerroth, PÅ., Gustavsson, H. et al. Widespread episodic thiamine deficiency in Northern Hemisphere wildlife. Sci Rep 6, 38821 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep38821
Mantua, N., R. Johnson, J. Field, S. Lindley, T. Williams, A. Todgham, N. Fangue, C. Jeffres, H. Bell, D. Cocherell, J. Rinchard, D. Tillitt, B. Finney, D. Honeyfield, T. Lipscomb, S. Foott, K. Kwak, M. Adkison, B. Kormos, S. Litvin, and I. Ruiz-Cooley. 2021. Mechanisms, impacts, and mitigation for thiamine deficiency and early life stage mortality in California’s Central Valley Chinook salmon. N. Pac. Anadr. Fish Comm. Tech. Rep. 17: 92–93. https://doi.org/10.23849/npafctr17/92.93.
UC Davis School of Education Blog Posts: https://education.ucdavis.edu/ccs-salmon-classroom
Video of Carson Jeffres Describing the Program:
KCRA Broadcast: https://www.kcra.com/article/solano-county-spinning-salmon-high-schoolers-help/42760396
Solano County Post: https://www.solanocoe.net/Educational-Services/Curriculum–Instruction/Environmental-Education/Spinning-Salmon-Citizen-Science
One problem identified in the Baltic was from extended, delayed, and stressful salmon migrations and prespawn conditions. Water managers have purposely delayed spawning. Hundreds of miles of migration routes are too warm. Salmon are forced to remain in ocean or Bay for months. San Francisco Bay reaches 70F in summer. Water quality standards are ignored.
Salmon need clean water. California lacks appropriate standards in its planning for water releases and does not allow enough in-stream flow.