Showing posts with the label Fish

Posts

The Life of Sockeye

Yesterday was World Fisheries Day! In that spirit, Celeste Digiovanni, a PhD student in Environmental Geography studying marine governance in Canada wrote a post inspired from the point of view of an iconic species, the sockeye. My eyes opened. There were thousands of others like me. I saw some emerging from their little jelly-like sacks amongst the gravel. I felt the cold, tasteless water on my scales for the first time. I gasped for my first breath and found it- was I alive? We started flapping our bits around and found rhythm, some of us more coordinated than others. I started to navigate this new underwater world beyond the sack that once confined me; slowly leaving, back to the gravel. New life. We swam around the river as light turned into dark. We fed on the zooplankton that we could find. We outgrew our river, and as those before us, ventured into a much saltier and colder world. We encountered others that resembled us throughout our journey. Some were trapped in nets, but a ...

Visiting the uOttawa Aquariums for World Water Day

Did you know that uOttawa recycles water? As in use it, get it dirty, and use it again? I'll bet you didn’t. Now, of course, you can’t just use it immediately after dirtying it, but with the right filtration system, the water can be used over and over. That’s what they are doing in the uOttawa Aquatic Care facilities on campus. So in honour of World Water Day, with this year's theme being waste water, we spoke to Bill Fletcher from the Aquatic Care facility on how they are reducing water waste right here on campus. The Aquatic Care facility focuses on the research related to fish and amphibians, so you can imagine they use a lot of water. (I asked why the frogs were all like this. I learned that this is how they relax, a little creepy in my opinion but you know, I am not a frog). The facilities currently use 30 Million litres of water a year! Wow. But 85% of that water is getting reused right in the facility. How you might ask? One word: Bio-filters. ...