A citizen science day to discover the adventures of eels in the Besòs River
The public space of Parc Fluvial del Besòs will be the place for a fishing day with scientific purposes, which will take place on Sunday, May 13, at 10.30 a.m., with the support from the teams of the Faculty of Biology of the University of Barcelona. This activity is one of the proposals of the City Council of Santa Coloma de Gramanet to join Letʼs Clean Up Europe 2018, a common action initiative in Europe to raise awareness on the impact of the waste that is thrown into the environment without any control.
The public space of Parc Fluvial del Besòs will be the place for a fishing day with scientific purposes, which will take place on Sunday, May 13, at 10.30 a.m., with the support from the teams of the Faculty of Biology of the University of Barcelona. This activity is one of the proposals of the City Council of Santa Coloma de Gramanet to join Letʼs Clean Up Europe 2018, a common action initiative in Europe to raise awareness on the impact of the waste that is thrown into the environment without any control.
This science fishing session in Parc Fluvial del Besòs aims to encourage people to participate in a citizen science initiative which aims to create a monitoring census on the fish community in the Besòs River. Therefore, participants can see how some fish are caught with an electrofishing team and will discover the scientific protocols that are used to study their features (physical conditions, length, etc.) before returning them to their natural habitats.
The incredible adventures of eels in the Besòs River
As part of the session, there will be at 1 noon, the presentation of the book La incredïble aventura de les anguiles del riu Besòs (Editorial Ajuntament de Santa Coloma de Gramanet, 2018), a play by the lecturer Dolors Vinyoles, expert on the study of freshwater fish communities, from the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences of the UB. The co-author and illustrator of the book is Noëlle Fabre, from the Department of Linguistic and Literary Education, and Teaching and Learning of Experimental Sciences and Mathematics of the UB.
The Mayor of Santa Coloma, Núria Parlon, and Gustavo Llorente, Dean of the Faculty of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences of the UB and the Biodiversity Research Institute of the University of Barcelona (IRBio) will take part in the presentation of the activity.
This story tells, in a fun and entertaining way, the vital cycle of eels (Anguilla anguilla), a species that goes upriver after thousands of kilometres, coming from the Sargasso Sea, where it breeds. When coming back to the river, the larva -called leptocephalous- will become eels -young eels- and will enter the river. These will grow for more than eight years until they become the typical yellow eels.
After this time, these eels will undergo morphological and physiological changes until becoming silver eels, which are ready to go to the sea to breed, after a year, in which they cannot feed. “Therefore, this is an interesting story to make kids become interested in this”, say the authors Dolors Vinyoles and Noëlle Fabre.
Letʼs Clean Up Europe 2018 in Parc Fluvial del Besòs
More than a million people who live in Santa Coloma de Gramanet use the public spaces of Parc Fluvial del Besòs over the year. As part of Letʼs Clean Up Europe 2018, framed within the European Week for Waste Reduction, all participants can contribute to the preservation of the environmental surroundings with a collective clean up in the natural space of Parc Fluvial del Besòs, one of the most important green spaces in the metropolitan area of Barcelona.
More information and registrations
https://ca-es.facebook.com/ecometropoli
ecometropoli@gramenet.cat