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Park City • Alex Astoria poured a tiny fish from a plastic cup into the pond at Deer Valley's Snow Park Lodge and proclaimed its name.

"Poochie!" the 6-year-old Astoria announced. "Because it's so cute."

Astoria and her kindergarten classmates from McPolin Elementary in Park City released dozens of alevins — juvenile rainbow trout — into the pond May 30 as part of Trout in the Classroom, a nationwide conservation project operated by Trout Unlimited and state biologists.

In January, 18 classrooms from kindergarten through high school received fish eggs from the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and watched the trout hatch and mature, with the goal of distributing them to stocked ponds around the state.

Some of the classrooms had better luck than others, said Dave Allison, vice president of the High Country Fly Fishers Trout Unlimited Chapter out of Park City. Last year, somebody stole dozens of baby fish from a classroom during Presidents Day weekend, Allison said. This year, the fish died in a couple of classes, including McPolin's kindergarten. A bacteria that typically is used to stabilize the water before fish are added was introduced while the fish were inside, and it absorbed all of their oxygen, Allison said.

However, a high-school class that didn't bother to clean their tank produced a healthy group of trout, which they allowed the kindergartners to adopt, Allison said.

Calvin Sidlow, 6, memorialized the dead fish in his release of a newly adopted alevin, which he named Chuck Norris.

"My last fish, he was brown and he looked like Chuck Norris," Sidlow said.

The project is designed to "connect kids back to their environment," said DWR spokeswoman Chanté Lundskog.

"By providing the eggs and the opportunity to see them grow, we can create future anglers," she said.

Emily Garcia, 6, marveled at the lives of her three fish, which she named Rosie, Flower and Elizabeth.

"They were just in an egg," she said. "They turned to baby fish, they will turn to alevins, and then they will turn into big grown-ups."

That may be a bit optimistic, Allison acknowledged.

"They'll probably all be eaten in about 10 minutes," he said as the children released their little fish into a big pond.

Twitter: @erinalberty