Angela, Barbara, Steve, Jonathan, and Madalyn worked the NGI-NOAA fisheries trawling activity table at the Celebrate the Gulf Marine Education Festival in Pass Christian on Saturday, April 7, 2018. The activity idea was borrowed from Chris Simoniello’s GCOOS  activity. Our activity consisted of having the kids: select a small or large mesh “net” for the trawl, pull the net through the container filled with animals, sorting the animals into groups, recording the counts on a field sheet, then transferring those counts to a cumulative bar graph representing the total counts for the day.

Over one hundred kids participated in our trawl activity! Approximately eighty children using the small mesh trawl net and the remaining using the large mesh trawl net. The idea of having large and small mesh results graphed separately is to show how the trends in types of animals caught changes with gear selection. This activity tells the story of how we study fisheries in the Gulf from the planning phase (gear selection) to pulling the trawl, sorting by type of organism, enumerating, and recording results, and  bringing those results back to the lab and creating visual products.

We received great feedback from members who planned the event and the kids seemed to really enjoy the hands-on activity. They seemed to enjoy comparing their catch to the others as well.