Her seven-year-old son, Eddie, would not stop talking about starfish. Five-year-old Emma ran off again to ogle the sea horses. But for Trish Finegan of Kilkenny, the favourite sea creature she learned about yesterday had to be the angler, otherwise known as the "feminist fish".
For any male angler unfortunate enough to court her, the female angler latches on to him with natural hooks, attaches an umbilical cord to him, and keeps him barely alive, just for the sex. And she has a couple of males as extras for when the first becomes boring.
"I know a few women who should start doing that to their husbands," Ms Finegan said as she walked through the Science Week exhibits yesterday afternoon at Oceanworld Aquarium in Dingle. The anglers are one of many unusual fish that swim along the shores of Dingle. They are relatively rare in Irish waters, but hundreds of children ran feverishly around searching the tanks for more common tenants, like plaice, cod and pollock.
The children might have been asleep on their books if they were learning marine biology in the classroom.
But put them in a building with eels swimming overhead and live sharks floating up against stingrays, and they instantly become amateur scientists. They excitedly filled out quiz sheets packed with daunting questions about marine life to win bags of sweets. A test was never completed more willingly.
"This is different from school," said 10-year-old Kevin Desmond from Tralee. "If school was like this, I might pay attention."
Head aquarist T.J. Scanlon gave about 50 children a lecture on Ireland's many exotic fish. It was the same tutorial he usually gives to naval personnel who must inspect foreign vessels for illegal sea cargo.
Partly due to climate change and new Gulf Stream patterns, hundreds of new species of fish have been found lately in Irish waters, he told them.
"We've been getting a lot of deep-water species that have never been seen around here before," he said.
"From puffer fish. . .to new types of tuna, we don't know where they came from."
He also taught them the dangers of littering the ocean, where the plastic that holds a six-pack of cans can fit around the neck of a young fish or turtle, slowly strangling them as they grow up. Most litter is not biodegradable.