The water surrounding Oak Bay teems with biodiversity and the Friends of Uplands Park and Oak Bay’s Environmental Advisory Committee want residents to be more aware.
Chris Garrett, a member of both groups sponsoring the an event Wednesday as part of an ongoing series of educational talks.
“It’s the continuation of the idea of having an event where people can hear a lecture on relative, interesting, ongoing issues of local interest,” Garrett said. “This (event) is open to the public and we have three wonderful speakers who will tell us about the marine environment.”
The speakers include Royal B.C. Museum’s curator of invertebrates Melissa Fry, RBCM curator of vertebrate zoology Gavin Hanke and Uplands Park summer birding host Geoffrey Newell.
Hanke’s talk, Intertidal Fishes: A Marginal Life, will explore the different types of fishes that live around Oak Bay and the link between land and marine wildlife. When it comes to fish, there are 46 species of sculpin and 13 types of poacher fish alone.
“The diversity is outrageous,” Hanke said. “A lot of these fish some will see, which are inter-tidal, and some are sub-tidal so you will need to snorkel or use a seine net to see them.”
Fry’s talk, Biodiversity and Bioinvasions: how globalization has changed our local marine communities will include invasive species and how they affect the ecosystem. For example, the European green crab, which arrived here in the last 10 years, feeds on inter-tidal plants and animals such as oysters, mussels, clams and juvenile crabs.
The birds of the Salish Sea will be the topic of Newell’s presentation.
The lecture is on Wednesday, Feb. 19, from 7 to 9 p.m. at Windsor Park Pavilion (2451 Windsor Rd.).