Around 80 high school students attended the inaugural First Nationals environmental educational event on the Peel River on Thursday, November 14.
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00:00What everyone is really interested in and uses as a case is electrofishing basically
00:08instead of using a fishing line to catch the fish or nets, you actually put electricity
00:13into the water and it stuns the fish, it doesn't kill them, it just puts enough in there so
00:16that they freeze and then you can pick them up with the nets, then you can weigh and measure
00:20them and you can let them go.
00:21So fisheries and other fishing agencies have been using this for years and years.
00:28So I think the main thing here is to get the kids and the school involved in understanding
00:33what sort of science water in NSW uses, to look at different strategies we've had to
00:39implement such as the snags and see exactly how that helps fish and the river recover.
00:45Different animals and species inhabiting it and utilising the snags and you can see that
00:50from what we've collected today.
00:53They're good to go, there's another type of prawn here, it's a bit of a striped prawn.
01:08I thought they would electrocute the fish but no, it's the shocking of them, just a
01:14bit stunned, make them easier to catch and I found that really interesting.
01:20The device will measure water velocities and depth and give us an indication of our
01:31area and average velocities and automatically compute that into a stream discharge for us
01:36and that's helpful for our river operators to ensure that we're releasing enough water
01:42or if we need to reduce releases and things like that for people to make management decisions.
01:48I've been finding today really interesting, seeing how all the different machines and
01:58how different fishing works.
02:01I think my favourite part so far was seeing the electrofishing.
02:05So we've caught a couple of small fish and we've also caught things called, I don't know,
02:12yabbies, prawns, what do you call them, crawdads or something.
02:14I think the snags will make a big difference and fisheries have shown that as soon as you
02:17put habitat into places like this, fish come to it and will utilise it so I think it will
02:23definitely improve the fishing in this area.