Thank you to Kathy for organising, and everyone who managed to come along on Wednesday evening – thankfully the weather stayed dry for us! We collected about five kg of (mostly plastic) waste, with rather more sewage related rubbish (including wet wipes) than usual, following the heavy rains at the weekend. A summary of the finds is available in the pie-chart below, and the full report has gone on to national MCS for processing.

The fender must have been beached on the last tide, as the attached goose barnacles were still fresh. The barnacles (Lepas anatifera) are not a local species, requiring warm tropical or sub-tropical waters to breed. The adults, however, can survive attached to flotsam, and drift with ocean currents for long periods, and it has consequently been recorded as far North as Svalbard! Here the drifting assemblage has ended up including discarded fishing line, which can be seen in the background (blue filament) of the image below.

Above: Detail of one of the goose barnacles Lepas anatifera – the distincitve jointed legs are visible. In life these form a basket that the animal sweeps through the water to catch small zooplankton that the animal feeds on.

Thanks to Kathy MacAdam for organising the beach clean, and Mark Woombs for spotting the find, and identifying the barnacles!