Lan and Olga from Department of Conservation Talks to Us About our Waterways

Lan talks to us about what could be in our waterways

Lan and Olga try to find life in the stream!

Nice and shady here, I wonder what we find?

What a cool eel!

We shared our discoveries with the school after lunch!

We had a great day today. Lan Pham, from the Department of Conservation, came to talk to us about the importance looking after our waterways. She told the whole school about the species we could find in our local streams.Eels, bullies and koura (freshwater crayfish) live in healthy streams. Bloodworms and snails live in streams that are not so healthy. Otago is the hotspot area for the native NZ galaxiids. They were called this because of the star like pattern on them. Room 1 was really lucky because we went down to the stream and watched Lan and Olga use electrical fishing equipment to find if we had lots of life on our waterways. The type of fish we found would tell us how healthy our waterways were. We were excited to find short finned eels, red finned bullies and koura. Lan was really excited and thought our stream was really healthy. After lunch we shared our findings with the school. We hope to work with our school neighbours and plant areas of the waterway that have no shade. This will prevent the weeds and give more shade to the stream which will encourage freshwater fish and plants.