Slovakia - Natural history and Stunned fish

Today we went to one of the fish farms connected to the school, Yaro wanted to show us his contraption that he made to stun fish using an electical current.

The farm has lakes which have a variety of species of fish, and to a certain extent, look after themselves. They do have to be topped up sometimes, and bearing in mind some are carniverous, different species are required.

Yaro set up his machine, which is closely guarded with a code (just in case anyone else steals it and recklessly decides to fire it up and go fishing with it) and stuck the net into the water. The net has a current running through it and fish in the vicinity of the net are stunned. The length of time they are out depends on the size of the fish, smaller fish are stunned for longer because of their size; the current cannot discern between species or size, it's just a stun-all method. The fish were then collected up to pop into the lake, their new home. It isn't a method that we use at lycée and was interesting to see.

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The students joined in with collecting the fish, identifying the species and ensuring that they had enough water (therefore oxygen) during their ride in the buckets to the lake.

This afternoon, we went into Bratislava to visit the Natural History museum. It is (in comparison with the Natural History museum in London) quite small, but it has some interesting exhibitions; some of which have nothing whatsoever to do with natural history. There was an exhibition on farming in Slovakia from neolithic times to today which had information boards in
both Slovak and English and an exhibit of a three roomed house that would have been found in medieval times.

The museum also housed a glass exhibition, it had a multitude of vases, glasses and pieces of art in a rainbow of colours; it was well placed within the room, the light could penetrate the glass and you could see the forms and colours in their full glory, although it was poor in the number of exhibits, it was a good exhibition of the work of Zbigniew Horbowy (1935-2019)

The natural history section was interesting.

There was a collection of spiders, some were really rather large and a (fake) wooly mammouth on display and a very interesting exhibition on the evolution of humans which even had an explanation of how genetics defines your eye colour. The only thing I find hard about these museums is that it is painful to see some mammals stuffed behind glass, and it's usually the most beautiful of animals that end up filled with sawdust with button eyes: bears, wolves and bats. I cannot bear to even take photos of these poor creatures and I felt even worse when I came across the polar bear; it really is quite upsetting.

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