Consultancy Services

What can the Fisheries & Marine Environmental Research facility offer you?

Through the School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences, our laboratory has access to a large amount of equipment including:

• Age and growth of fish - otolith sectioning technology in bulk or individually;
• Vehicles (4WD), trailers, two 5.5 m open boats with full safety gear, depth sounder and differential GPS;
• 30,000 litre running seawater system;
• Microscopes and CCD cameras of all kinds, fluoresence microscopy and computers with a wide variety of software;
• Beach seines (15 x 2 m), plankton nets (60 µm mesh to 1,000 µm mesh);
• Salinity meters and other water quality measures;
• Optical plankton counters (ie particle size analysis) - either a laboratory based system (sizes from 100-4,000 µm), in situ instruments and towed body (300-4,000 µm), or image analysis (10 µm to 1000 µm);
• Fully equipped laboratory with fluorescent microplate reader, micro- balance, centrifuge, pH meter, fume hood etc.

We are able to undertake the following environmental projects:

• Field surveys of fish, zooplankton, phytoplankton and benthos - from the sampling design to the completion of the project, statistics and write up;
• Identification of larval fish, zooplankton and phytoplankton;
• Age and growth of fish - larval or adult. Generally we use thin sections of the ear stone (or otolith) and our lab can now process bulk samples (100s to 1000s of otoliths);
• Bio-indicators of environmental health using condition indices or fish or zooplankton;
• Red tide research - causes and effects;
• Particle size analysis;
• Environmental impact of estuarine re-stocking with fingerlings (mulloway);
• Stable isotope analysis of zooplankton, mussels, oysters and fish for nutrient tracing studies.

Below are listed some of the State and Local Government organisations that the Fisheries and Marine Environmental Research facility has conducted work for:

• Department of Lands & Water Conservation;
• NSW-Environmental Protection Authority;
• NSW Fisheries;
• Great Lakes Council;
• Midcoast Water;
• Smiths Lake Estuary Management Committee;
• CRC for Freshwater Ecology.