Wild About Wetlands

Brad Kruger's blog | Created 1 decade ago

When WA Museum’s Perth Education team was asked to present some Froggy Fun workshops at Herdsman Lake’s Biodiversity Bash, they hopped at the chance!

The three-day event, run in October by the Herdsman Lake Wildlife Centre and the WA Gould League, celebrated wetland biodiversity with a range of exciting hands-on activities for primary school students, including hunting for water bugs, meeting some wetland birds and learning some Noongar hunting skills.

The WA Museum team took their brand-new Biodiversity Backpacks out for a spin, and approximately 600 students had the chance to test the temperature, pH and turbidity of the water in Herdsman Lake. The students were quickly transformed into junior environmental scientists, dipping their thermometers into the water sample, submerging the pH paper strips, and pouring water into the super-long turbidity tubes to discover how clear the water was.

Students were pleased to learn that the water testing results were positive for a healthy frog and tadpole habitat.

Each group also practised making frog calls of local species and then compared their attempts to recordings of the real calls. Then it was off for a frog ‘hunt’, where students spotted some beautiful Motorbike Frogs and Slender Tree Frogs perched on reeds around the water’s edge.

The event was thoroughly enjoyed by all, and the odd spattering of rain did not come close to dampening the spirits of the students and presenters who immensely enjoyed their wetland adventure.

The new Biodiversity Backpacks, developed by the Museum Education team, contain a range of activities for assessing the health of local wetland ecosystems and will continue to be used for future Museum activities, including ongoing monitoring of the Urban Native Wetlands which have been recently developed in the Perth Cultural Centre.

The Biodiversity Backpacks were from a grant from the Council of Australian Museum Directors, and were funded with assistance from the Science Connections Program within the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.