The Inanga Monitoring Project

Today, 8 March 2012, a small group of Eco Warriors from R13 went to the stream beside the school to set bait traps for WaiCare. We are working with WaiCare to monitor the inanga, or small fish, in our stream. The scientists are doing a study and they need members of the public to help set the bait traps and send in the data about what fish were caught.


We didn’t know if there would be any inanga…. So we set out at 10.30am to set the traps!

Julia from WaiCare helped us. She brought the 5 traps. We put them together carefully and then, before we shut them tight, we put in a small medicine bottle which contained the BAIT. It had a small amount of cheese (to attract the fish) and marmite. Yum!! Kiwi kids love marmite.

We set three traps below the waterfall and two traps above the waterfall section of the stream. It had been raining a little in the night and the stream was quite high. We chose quiet sections of the stream out of the turbulent, rushing water in the middle.

We returned to the stream about two and a half hours later to take out the traps.... what did we find?
We did not get anything in the traps this time - no inanga, banded kokopu, smelt or baby eels.


Our stream may be too silted up or polluted to be an ideal habitat for fish life. We will go back again later in the year to check again.


But... We did find lots of rubbish and were horrified to see that most of it probably blew down from our school. We think we need to be more careful and not have any plastic wrappings in our lunch boxes!




AT,  BW-H, LK, GM, LY & JW