Scientist for a Day: Ichthyologist

Ages: 8-12 yrs

The Scientist for a Day program is a social and educational full day workshop for young minds aged 8-12, designed to show kids what it’s like to work in different areas of science.

These autumn school holidays, children will meet Amanda Hay & Dr Yi-Kai Tea (aka Kai the Fish Guy) and learn what their life as an ichthyologists entails. Learn what ichthyology is, including what makes a fish a fish, their anatomy and how they move.

As they learn about the ocean environment and how creatures live in such environments, your little ichthyologists in the making will undertake hands-on scientific experiments, get access to behind-the-scenes of the Australian Museum Research Institute (AMR) collection and learn about the effects of climate change on our oceans and what they can do to help.

Amanda Hay has 25 years of experience in Ichthyological collections and research and has been employed as Ichthyology collection manager since 2018. As collection manager, Amanda is responsible for developing and maintaining the museum’s fish collection, facilitating access to the collection for visiting researchers and through loans as well as providing expertise to the museum’s public programs, and answering public and scientific enquiries.

Dr Yi-Kai Tea is the Australian Museum's Chadwick Biodiversity Research Fellow.

He recently completed his PhD at the University of Sydney on the systematics and evolutionary history of coral reef fishes, focusing on wrasses (family Labridae) from the genus Cirrhilabrus (fairy wrasses) and Pseudojuloides (pencil wrasses). Kai’s research interests combine the use of cutting-edge next generation sequencing techniques with traditional methods of morphology to better understand the evolutionary history of coral reef fishes, in particular groups that have intractable taxonomy and/or phylogenetic relationships. In doing so, he has revised the taxonomy of several coral reef fish groups, in addition to having described over twenty species as new to science.