Salmon Experiment

I grow bardic about Salmon’s contribution to Gaia, making possible the sea’s fertility flowing upstream to the headwaters. I want to teach that at Chrysalis but how do I teach it to kids? I don’t want to just say it as a lecture. We are very near the Sacramento River so we can walk down every week and watch the fall run spawning and dying. But how do I teach about the gift of fertility?

After mulling it over, I started some experiments with the kids. In the forest, we created four one-meter-square plots by cutting away the vegetation (and later weighing its dry weight). Last week we buried two dead salmon from the river in two of the plots. Next spring we will clear the vegetation from the four plots, weigh the dried vegetation, and see if the two plots with salmon grew more abundantly. That is our hypothesis.

However, we did another experiment where we took two jars of pond water and put some salmon meat in one and not the other. I hypothesized that the meat jar would experience a greater quantity of life. It seethed with bacterial life for a couple of days and then crashed. I assume the bacteria consumed all of the dissolved oxygen and everything died. When one starts an experiment, one must be prepared to deal with the actual results. A constraint I put upon my teaching is that I don’t allow myself to say about some experimental result “Well, what we should have gotten…” That’s not an experiment then. That is a demonstration posing as an experiment. Experiments inspire more of students’ mindfulness than a demonstration but then a teacher must be prepared to be equally mindful in honestly making sense of the actual results.

This also makes me aware that experiments that go against our hypothesis can teach us in two ways. We can abandon our hypothesis. Or we can continue our faith in the hypothesis and change our experimental procedures to find out under what conditions our hypothesis is true. Each is a valid response. With our pond jars, for example, I am sure that the salmon meat will lead to an increase of aquatic life. However, a river is different than a jar of water. A river moves, dilutes, stirs in oxygen. I can not explain away the dead jar by saying that “normally life would increase in response to the meat”. My only legitimate response is to learn from the dead jar and repeat the experiment under different conditions (less meat, occasional stirring, etc) and see if we can create an increase in aquatic life.

One of the things I love about experiments (which contains one of my hopes for Chrysalis) is that they always turn out messier than one predicts because an experiment brings into awareness others of the interconnections that bind this universe together. The magic lies in the interconnections. In trying to study one interconnection, the results are influenced by others. In the tangle is the fascination, the magic web of the creation.

This theme is re-visited in 21 In Context quote on experiments.