It's eel season!

For my nature observation this week, I decided to talk about something different than the weather, which is what I usually talk about. For my Biology lab we have been going to Quassaick Creek in Newburgh to observe the Herring that have been passing through, and this past week we set up an 'eel' experiment. Believe it or not: we literally went into the creek in wet suits, set up the net, and caught eels in the net. But don't worry, we let them go afterwards!

The whole purpose of this experiment was to understand how the eel population and how it is declining in certain areas. What we did with this information of the eels was we weighed and counted the eels, and we used this data just as a basic measurement of the eel population around the Hudson River area.

This experiment is the perfect example of something that I would love to do in the classroom with my students. I loved having this hands on experience with my professor, and I would want my students to have the same experience. I think that it is a great way to get students outside the classroom and it is a fun and exciting topic that still involves things in the scientific world. This really did make me understand how science is all around us all the time. We can see science in so many different things through observing, collecting data, using inquiry, and gathering results. This all leads to a comparison of other data and leads to new ideas being discovered, and understanding that science is constantly around us, and we can see this in something like studying eels!