Rainbow trout have recently splashed their way onto the Lincoln High School farm to be cared for by students.

The farm received around 45 trout from the California Department of Fish and Game on Jan. 26, that will be used in the natural-history class, which is part of Lincoln High School’s Ag program.

Lincoln High School is the only school in Northern California to be raising trout, said Mark Fowler, who teaches the natural-history class. He said students in the natural-history class have raised trout as part of the class for at least the last seven years.

“Everyone in the class is involved with the maintenance of the trout,” Fowler said.

Maintenance includes testing water quality often and feeding the fish.

Students will conduct nutritional studies, including seeing if diet affects their color and how the trout taste, according to Fowler.

“It’s really cool to do the actual tests,” said Noah Vargas, 16.

Vargas said he and other students test the water chemistry to ensure that the trout tanks have the correct level of ammonia, water hardiness and chemical balances.

If the water “isn’t just right,” he said, the fish could die.

“Taking care of them is the fun part,” said Topher Devol, 17, who said the fish are between six inches and one foot long. “The natural history class is not like any other of the science classes I’ve ever taken.”

When students are done with the fish for the year, Fowler said the fish are not to be released in the wild since he said, “we can’t confirm that our tanks are completely sterile and that we wouldn’t be releasing a fungus or bacteria into the wild.”

Since the fish cannot be released into the wild, Fowler said they have to be put down.

The fish do not go to waste though, serving a purpose after their lives are over.

“It’s fun having the hands-on experience,” Rose Voris, 16, said. “At the end, we eat them.”

The fish are separated into two tanks and, Fowler said, the fish in each tank are fed different food.

“One tank will receive trout food and one tank will receive live food like bugs, worms and smaller fish,” he explained, adding that the student catch the live food from a nearby canal and out on the farm. “They see if diet influences taste.”

Another test will be seeing whether diet influences the color of the fish.

“The pellet tank might end up being darker or might be lighter,” Vargas said.

Fish not used for the taste test will be frozen so that next year’s natural-history class can dissect them.

“It was cool because they were frozen and not preserved,” Voris said about last year’s dissected fish.

Fowler said dissecting the frozen fish “is more of an organic method” of dissection since chemicals to preserve the fish are not used.

Studying fish is just one part of the natural-history class, which Fowler said is a college-prep class. Students study animals, amphibians, reptiles and birds, in addition to fish.

“If you took it as a college class, it’s called vertebrate zoology,” he explained.