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.
