Maz, Barb and I spent a day out at the NIWA Aquaculture facility at Mahanga Bay working with Graeme Moss on the paua project. The scientists are researching how best to farm paua so they breed lots of families from different parents to determine the fasted growing and those that grow the biggest.
Each paua needs to be tagged so it can be identified to the parents that it came from.
Our job was to help put on their second tag, measure and weigh them and then enter this information on the database.
Putting on the tag was a bit tricky as it was a tiny spring that needed to be hooked onto the edge of the shell. As the shell grows it grows over the spring and keeps it in place.
The paua were really cool and some stuck pretty hard to your hand. The naughty ones tried to escape by flipping over onto their foot so we had to flick them back over onto their shells until we had finished with them.
I also learnt how to tell if a paua is male or female - if you look under the foot for the gonad you will see that the male's is creamy white and the female's is a shiny green colour.
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