School Visit by The Inland Fisheries Board

On the 27^th May 2016 the Inland Fisheries Board visited our school. They came to teach us about water and the fish that live in Irish waters. They also came as part of our work for our third Green Flag on water.

Firstly, containers were brought into the school and filled with water. While this was happening classes from 1^st to 6th went into Ms Dillane’sroom where a woman called Catherine showed us a slideshow on the IWB.

The first thing she did was explain her job to us. It sounded very interesting. She works with the Inland Fisheries Board and monitors and counts how many fish we have in our rivers and lakes. She showed us pictures of some of the devices used to count the fish.

Following this, Catherine showed us some photographs of different fish that live in our local rivers. We were not very good at identifying them so she gave us some good tips on remembering some of the most common fish – perch have black stripes on their body and yellow fins and the roach has red eyes. We also talked about the different properties of fish such as their gills, scales and fins.

Next Catherine taught us about the lifecycle of the salmon and the eel. We found the salmon lifecycle very interesting. Here is a diagram to explain what we learned about:

Catherine then showed us pictures of different insects that live in clean and dirty water. The crayfish lives in very clean water while the leech lives in dirty, polluted water. This is one of the ways in which Catherine and her colleagues can test if rivers are clean or dirty.

We also saw photographs of Ireland’s biggest shark. It is called the Baskin shark.  This shark swims with its mouth open to catch its prey and filter the water.  We then learned about a type of mussel which was introduced to Ireland a few years ago called the zebra mussel.   Since then it has drastically increased in number and is now endangering marine life.

After all this learning, we were split into two groups.  Ms Dillanes and Mrs Ambroses class went out to the hall to look at the fish in the containers.  As you can see from the photographs oxygen tanks were placed into the containers as one fish died during our talk with Catherine.  Mrs Kennelly’s class were given magnifying glasses so they could look at different bugs and insects that live in water.  They were given a fact sheet to help them identify the bugs and insects.
We really enjoyed our talk with Catherine and her colleagues and loved learning about water and fish found in our local rivers and lakes. We hope this work helps us towards getting our third Green Flag.