The Tiburon Salmon Institute is premised on the belief that children have power. By teaching and giving children hands on experience, they learn life skills that will help them to rebuild the dwindling habitat and save the remaining salmon fishery that now exists. Through projects such as the salmon rearing pens at the Tiburon Romberg Center for Environmental Studies, children of different ages will actually care for and manage 50,000 fingerling salmon in floating pens. This project has been run by the San Francisco Tyee Club for over 30 years releasing over a million salmon into our San Francisco Bay.
Now through a unique partnership children will work with educators, scientists, and conservationists in raising, protecting and enhancing salmon and their habitat here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Students will watch as salmon eggs in classroom aquariums develop through different stages into actual salmon. They will learn about the habitat that salmon need to survive in our rivers and streams. They will actually release these young fish into the appropriate habitats.
In a partnership with the nationally recognized program, United Anglers of Casa Grande, students will learn how these students have restored a salmon run to the once dead Adobe Creek in Petaluma. Students of the Tiburon Salmon Institute will learn how the students of Casa Grande restored this creek and created their own state of the art hatchery that now produces 40,000 salmon a year. These salmon are released in Tiburon and other parts of the bay.
Through hands on work with programs like the United Anglers of Casa Grande and the San Francisco Tyee Club and Foundation, students of the Tiburon Salmon Institute will develop their own projects related to preserving salmon and habitat. They will learn how to follow scientific protocols, write grants, and work in partnership with scientists, environmental organizations, and government agencies as well as other children.
The program is designed to instill leadership skills in children and young adults to allow them to take charge and follow to completion, their own environmental project.
By Brooke Halsey