AUBURN – Tanner Barker is no stranger to salmon eggs.

The 10-year-old helped foster about 200 of the tiny spheres last year when he was a third-grader. He watched the eggs, monitored them, recorded changes. It took months. It took patience. And in the end, he had to release the baby fish into the wild.

But that didn’t stop Barker, now a fourth-grader, from bouncing with excitement Tuesday when his Washburn Elementary School class got a batch of salmon eggs.

“You can see their little eyeballs!” he exclaimed, peering into the 30-gallon tank set at the back of the classroom. “What if they just hatched right now?”

Established by the Atlantic Salmon Federation in 1992, the Fish Friends program was created to educate children about ecology, encourage stewardship of the environment and help increase the Atlantic salmon population. When it started, 29 Canadian schools raised eggs, fostering them through the fry stage. Now, about 900 schools across the eastern seaboard participate.

Neil Ward, director of the Androscoggin River Alliance, distributes eggs to nine schools in central and southern Maine, including three in Auburn. The students will study the eggs to learn about fish life cycles, wildlife habitats, animal adaptation and environmental stability. When they hatch, the fish will be released into waters that feed into the Androscoggin River, where the once-thriving Atlantic salmon population has dwindled to nearly nothing.

In the wild, about half the eggs would die before hatching. In the controlled environment of the classroom, most will survive.

“We feel it’s a win-win for everybody,” Ward said.

Jill Bartash’s combined third- and fourth-grade classroom got its eggs Tuesday. About 200 of the tiny, peach-colored balls were poured into a special aquarium while the 19 students looked on with delight.

Barker helped raise the eggs last year when he was a third-grader at a different school. His favorite part was watching them hatch.

“It’s so cool. They stick their heads out and their tails out and they swim,” he said.

He was looking forward to a similar experience with this group of eggs and many other eggs in the future. Thanks to the salmon project, Barker said he wants to work for an aquarium when he grows up.

“It makes me think people need to take care of the rivers and not pollute them,” he said.

Washburn Elementary School’s salmon eggs came from the Craig Brook National Fish Hatchery in East Orland. About 800,000 eggs mysteriously died in that hatchery recently, but the school project was not significantly affected by the loss.

Soon after the eggs hatch this spring, students will release the baby fish – called fry – in a stream in Lisbon. The hope: Some will survive long enough to travel to the Androscoggin River, reach the Atlantic and return to spawn as adults. Statistically, only two out of 8,000 salmon make it.

But Bartash, the classroom teacher, said the kids were optimistic.

“They feel like their salmon are out there somewhere, and they come back,” she said.