New Testament Students Participate in Watershed Testing

The ninth and 10th grade biology students at in Norton, traveled to the Three Mile River in Taunton Tuesday morning to learn about a citizen run water quality monitoring program through the Taunton River Watershed Alliance. 

They learned how to collect water samples and how the TRWA's water quality monitoring program has maintained a data record over the years of the water quality here in the Taunton River watershed. Students used actual equipment to take water samples & learned about the importance of consistency & accuracy in testing.

The sixth grade class traveled to the Middleborough Herring run to listen to a talk by Herring Commissioner David Cavanaugh. The Herring run in Middleborough is one of the third largest fish runs on the east coast. They learned about what it was like to be on the bottom of the food chain and how important it is for the environment to have fish like the herring.

The students were allowed to help the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management collect 1,000 fish. The RI DEM was at the fish run with permission from the state of MA "borrowing" herring from the Middleborough run to use to restock the Kickemuit Reservoir. Rhode Island had recently installed new fish ladders on some rivers that had been dammed and were hoping to re-introduce the species to their riverways. Students then helped Cavanaugh with a herring commissioner's daily job of recording water and air temperature and counting the number of fish that travel through the run for a ten minute period of time (297 fish were counted).