Last Friday, on May 3, 2024, the Nature Park School, in collaboration with the Pedagogical Center Mondsee, as part of the semester-long project "Mondsee Full of Water - Water Full of Life," visited the Institute of Aquatic Ecology and Fisheries Management. This project, supported by numerous partners, focuses on the aquatic habitat, specifically Lake Mondsee, as a habitat.
This project of the Nature Park team and the Pedagogical Center Mondsee is made possible through the initiative "Water Full of Life" by BIPA and the Association of Austrian Nature Parks, which has been in existence since 2023 under the motto "Protecting Nature, Supporting Nature Parks." With this initiative, the partners promote children's awareness and protect water bodies in nature parks.
In the first exciting module, the children were guests at the Institute of Aquatic Ecology and Fisheries Management, specifically at the Vocational School for Fisheries Management. There, they were warmly welcomed by the institute's director, Dr. Achleitner, and her colleague Florian Keil. The experts divided the children into two homogeneous groups and explained to them, at an age-appropriate level, what happens at the institute, what is meant by the terms aquatic ecology and aquaculture, and explained the anatomy of fish. The children also learned in which sections of rivers certain fish species can be found, they learned to name the parts of a fish, and now know what various fish eat. A particularly special highlight for the older group was the dissection of a trout from the Kreuzstein fish farm at the end. Meanwhile, the younger children had the opportunity to view plankton under a microscope.