Eel trapping

Over the last 2 days I've been up at my thesis site, attempting to see what the eel population of my thesis site is. The plan was to do a quick survey before and after the spraying of Roundup on my site to see if the eels are effected...

Step 1: put out the fyke nets (which we did yesterday in the rain... not so fun)
Step 2: stay with Danny and Bruno over night, with mandatory wine drinking and Desperate Housewives
Step 3: pull out the nets and see what we got!

So here I am this morning, pulling out one of our larger nets (thankfully it was a nice day today!)

One of the interesting things we caught were about 200 adult Diving Beetles. These are the adults of the larvae I found a few months ago - Onychohydrus hookeri - and like the larvae, the adults are also pretty high up the food chain...

In a pond that is...

This is what they can do to a Common Bully which was stuck in a net with them for a few hours... not a nice way to die I think!

Unfortunately most of the beetles we caught were drowned in the nets - the adults need to breath air which the collect from the surface and hold under there wing cases.

The good thing about finding so many of these is that we could get some compelling stats if the population drops much after spraying... so that was an interesting twist and possibly some good extra data that we weren't expecting to collect.

And the to the eel's - we did find 2 of them (not as many as we were hoping for!) but they were both huge (well over 1m). This is pretty big for Short Fin Eels, but it's still odd that there weren't more young'ns with them...

They are pretty quick and didn't feel like chilling in the bin while I took photos!

Lots of other things to see - there were heaps of Damselfly adults flying about and mating - male on the top ;)
And there were lots of Dragonflies too - although these weren't so easy to catch on camera! If you can't find it have a look at the end of this post....

Pretty pics to end with - it really was an awesome day up there today.

Thank you so much to Logan for helping me out, and Danny and Bruno for putting me up for the night :)

Here's where the dragonfly is :P