Official website of the Aquarium-Museum
University of Liège
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Teacher’s Space
General Information
The Aquarium-Museum: a tool for observing and learning, to become acquainted with or dig more deeply into the Life Sciences.
Intended for the scholastic community: kindergarten, primary, secondary, and university.
Starting in kindergarten children discover the important diversity of life and recognise its main characteristics. In primary school the students become aware of the unity, of the diversity, of the classification of the living world as well as the complexity of the Environment. Once in secondary school, the young people must integrate the more complex notions in the large range of the Natural Sciences. In University and other Higher Education institutes, students are guided toward a profession: the detailed analysis of the collections in the Aquarium-Museum is very helpful.
The Aquarium...
With its 46 tanks recreating the different aquatic environments, the Aquarium is a precious teaching tool to understand and learn about the sea, the oceans, the lakes and rivers from around the world.
The observation of live animals living in recreated environments represents a unique opportunity to examine, study, think… in detail about how they swim, eat, breath, behave with others, camouflage themselves, reproduce… In a few words: to tackle the Biology of aquatic animals, both from seawater and fresh water.
Finally, larger or more precise notions can be examined: the classification of the animal kingdom, the complexity of environments, the actions and impact of Man on ecosystems, food chains, the cycle and quality of water…
The Museum...
With close to 20000 specimens conserved, naturalised, as skeletons… representing the biodiversity of the global fauna, the collections of the Zoology Museum are a unique educational partner. The species are presented according to classical Systematics, that is the traditional classifications, inherited from Carl von Linnaeus and Charles Darwin. This presentation doesn’t take much into consideration the phylogenesis, that is to say the history of the evolution of one species or a group of related species.
This presentations allows for a global approach to the diversity of the species, to the binomial nomenclature (two Latin names to designate a species, the genus name followed by a species qualifier: Felis catus, the domestic cat), to taxonomy based on several common characteristics, to the hierarchical classification in groups of organisms more and more numerous (species, genus, family, order, class, branch, kingdom)…
Finally, the Museum specimens allow the observation of the external characteristics of animals, to understand their anatomy, to analyse their adaptations to life on earth, in the air, in the water… More than an initiation to animal life, a true acquiring of knowledge.
