KETCHIKAN — Schoenbar Middle School is becoming Ketchikan’s sea cucumber central.
Middle schoolers have long helped their science teachers gut, clean and cook the ocean critters to prepare for their annual school “survival” trips near Ketchikan.
On a Friday in September, three of teacher Michael Knight’s classes got the chance to see, touch and study — but not eat — some of the echinoderms.
Students were put to the task of gathering information to help with Charlotte Regula-Whitefield’s research for the Southeast Alaska Regional Dive Fisheries Association. They’re working to determine whether sea cucumbers can be raised in a hatchery and released into the wild to supplement wild stocks in southern southeast Alaska, reported the Ketchikan Daily News.
One of the classes, which met just after 12:30 p.m., included two dozen Schoenbar students who counted, weighed and measured juvenile sea cucumbers that had spent the past six months growing in cages in the Tongass Narrows.
Most students counted their way through about 25 cucumbers in each group, bouncing between delight and disgust, fascination and fright.
They started with counting the critters, which were kept in clear glass beakers divided among eight groups of students. After that, kids used their hands to fish out individual cucumbers for measuring.
“He’s going to die!” eighth-grader Kelsey Hamilton yelled when the measuring had started.
“No, he’s not. He’s an invertebrate,” said fellow eighth-grader Robert Cope-Powell, holding a cucumber.
After counting and measuring, students weighed the sea cucumbers before returning the cucumbers to their beakers.
Throughout the day, Cope-Powell was right. Compared to juvenile salmon or shellfish — other wildlife with a good chance of finding itself in a middle school classroom in Ketchikan — sea cucumbers are remarkably tough creatures, requiring much less care and attention than other local food sources.
They even take handling well — up until they’re a little too agitated and they “eviscerate.”
But there was no eviscerating that day, as the health of the animals is critical to SARDFA’s research.
The work of Schoenbar students will be used to determine how the hatchery-born cucumbers fared in their early days around Ketchikan, Regula-Whitefield said.
With cucumbers ranging in size from only a few millimeters to about the size of an index finger, and with survival rates of more than 10 percent, the information gathered by the students was promising.
