BW’s Rines’ first-year aquaponics project receives CTC Chemistry Project Work award

By LENNY C. LEPOLA

News Assis­tant Man­ag­ing Editor

At the end of last school year, 2011 Big Wal­nut High School grad­u­ate Don Hutchin­son ended his tenure as the dri­ving force behind the aquapon­ics project in the high school Ag Sci­ence room, hand­ing the project off to then fresh­man, now sopho­more, Jesse Rines.

The project began as an aqua­cul­ture endeavor five years ago when Ag Sci­ence teacher Jeni Reely pur­chased a 400-gallon tank and air­lift pump sys­tem with a $2,500 Inno­va­tions in Teach­ing Grant. Inno­va­tions in Teach­ing grants were inter­nal grants awarded by the school dis­trict to fund projects that fell out­side nor­mal cur­ricu­lum fund­ing; the grants were elim­i­nated as a cost-saving mea­sure fol­low­ing the onset of the cur­rent reces­sion in 2008.

In tak­ing the aquapon­ics project over this year, Rines stocked the tank with 120 bluegills he acquired from Bob Grimm at Catch of the Day, and placed 18 slow-bolt let­tuce plants on a hydro plat­form float­ing on the water surface.

The aquapon­ics oper­a­tion is close to a seam­less loop — fish and plants serv­ing each other’s needs with very lit­tle waste — that has poten­tial real-world appli­ca­tions, espe­cially in third world coun­tries seek­ing low cost and low-tech ways to grow food.

Rines said the let­tuce bal­ances the chem­istry in the tank via the nitro­gen cycle: ammo­nia is turned into nitrites, the nitrites are turned into nitrates, the nitrates build up and the plants on the plat­form use up the nitrates, mak­ing the chem­i­cal envi­ron­ment bet­ter for the fish.

“I mon­i­tored ammo­nia, nitrite, nitrate, pH, dis­solved oxy­gen and tem­per­a­ture, plus mea­sured the growth of the let­tuce the fish,” Rines explained. “I really had my own ecosys­tem going; I was in con­trol of a mini envi­ron­ment and it ran really well.”

Rines said he thought in pre­vi­ous years there were too many fish in the project tank, 200 yel­low perch dur­ing the pre­vi­ous year, 350 the year before that.

“I wanted fewer fish so I had to put less food in, mak­ing it eas­ier to con­trol the envi­ron­ment,” Rines said. “A lot of times com­mer­cial fish farm­ers have to inter­vene. I never had any prob­lems where I had to step in and chem­i­cally alter anything.”

This year’s aquapon­ics project was not problem-free, Rines said. He started with 3-inch long fish less than a year old, some fish grew, some didn’t. Next year he plans to split the tank between large and small fish to find out why some fish are not grow­ing as much as others.

But it was a learn­ing year, and the aquapon­ics project served as a Sci­ence Fair project. Rines wrote a report on the aquapon­ics tank Sci­ence Fair project and sent it to the Colum­bus Tech­ni­cal Coun­cil (CTC) where it earned a Chem­istry Project Work Award at the CTC’s April 18 annual banquet.

“The CTC chem­istry award was not what I orig­i­nally signed up for; the award was based on the paper por­tion of the project, hon­or­ing excel­lence in a chem­istry related project,” Rines said. “The CTC award was awe­some. I put a lot of work into this since the end of Sep­tem­ber, it’s good to get rec­og­nized for the work I’ve done; and it was inter­est­ing to see the other win­ning projects at the CTC ban­quet, the things they’re look­ing for with research projects. It’s also good to know there’s a lot more awards out there I can apply for.”

Big Wal­nut High School sci­ence teacher Matt Wallschlaeger said he was afraid the aquapon­ics project might evap­o­rate when Hutchin­son grad­u­ated, but Rines has proven that he has both the inter­est and the abil­ity to take the research project forward.

“I’m look­ing for­ward to how cre­ative Jesse’s going to be with it,” Wallschlaeger said. “The CTC recog­ni­tion will help moti­vate him, but now he has to dive in for the next two years in cre­ative ways to make the project dif­fer­ent. This has been a learn­ing year for Jesse, but he thrives in know­ing his work has some value.”

Both Rines and Wallschlaeger noted that Don Hutchin­son, who is attend­ing Wit­ten­berg Uni­ver­sity in Spring­field, main­tains an inter­est in the aquapon­ics project. Hutchin­son and Rines text about project prob­lems, and Hutchin­son was in town last week­end to help Rines empty and clean the tank for the project’s sum­mer downtime.

And the fish? Not to worry. They’re des­tined for retire­ment at a pri­vate pond.

Posted by Gary Henery on May 23 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.