In the second week of the school holidays the DPIRD Community Education team had a great day collaborating with DBCA’s Nearer to Nature program to deliver an action packed day of fishy discoveries! Over 40 budding marine biologists got up close and personal with a range of weird and wonderful WA fish species. Participants looked closely at features like tail shape, mouth type and colouration to gain an understanding on how these adaptions help species survive and thrive in our marine environment.
Technical Officer Elaine, from the ‘Send Us Your Skeletons‘ team kindly donated her time to pop in to demonstrate her dissection skills – wowing the crowd with a view of the inside of a donated WA dhufish frame and the extraction of the important otoliths (earbones) used to age fish.
Catching fish and sorting them by their features, photo – C Cooksey
What a catch! Photo courtesy of Nearer to Nature-DBCA
Getting up close with fish anatomy, photo courtesy of Nearer to Nature-DBCA
Technical Officer Elaine explaining the internal features of a WA dhufush, photo – C Cooksey