Above from left: Christian Thompson, Ellis Barton, Austin Kitching and Jess Norris, who will be presenting their research.
Ellis Barton: Evaluating the effects of dissolved organic carbon enrichment on scleractinian coral physiology.
Austin Kitching: Evaluating the effectiveness of bioremediation techniques in regulating the nutrient levels in the Main Lake, Williamson Park, Lancaster.
Jess Norris: The distribution of elasmobranch egg cases at five beaches on the Fylde Coast during the height of the spawning season.
Christian Thompson: Ecology and Habitat Use of the Velvet Crab (Necora puber): A Survey Across Intertidal Coastal Sites of the Fylde Coast.
Date: Wednesday 10th June 2026 Time: 19:30 to 21:00 Location: Lancaster Maritime Museum £4 donation to Lancashire MCS requested Everybody Welcome
The North West Marine Ecosystems (NWME) Conference 2026 will be held at the University of Liverpool on 24th June. (Registration closes 17th June 2026). Use the QR code above to register, or follow the link below:
Above: Building a wind turbine – Morecambe OWF Project/Flotation Energy.
The UK has been a pioneer in offshore windfarm development over the past 20 years thanks to our shallow seas. There is now a wealth of data on their impacts to the marine environment and still many questions to be answered. Richard will be talking about the impacts of windfarms on marine ecological receptor groups and what measures windfarm developers take to minimise the impacts of their construction and operation.
Our speaker is unable ot make the advertised date due to ill health. I am sure we all wish him a very speedy recovery, and I hope to be able to re-schedule this talk later in our current programme.
POSTPONED Wednesday 12th November at 19:30 @ Lancaster Maritime Museum £4 donation to Lancashire MCS requested Everybody Welcome!
The first MCS Celebration event for Beachwatch Organisers happened on Zoom on Monday 28th April, hosted by Claire Trotman,Beachwatch Officer. This was essentially a “thank you” from National MCS to all the people around the country who organise beach cleans/ cleans around estuaries etc. It was good to put faces to names and to see the enthusiasm which the staff at National MCS have for their work. Beachwatch is 30 years old and is a great example of Citizen Science.
The speakers emphasised the value of the data collected through our beach cleans and surveys which is used to inform campaigning for changes in legislation. Here is how it works:
The data is analysed by Greg Wannell, MCS data analyst.
Reports are created which are used for briefings to politicians from our parliaments (not Tynwald).
Government launches a consultation and uses the data to demonstrate the need for change and new legislation.
Examples of changes which have been influenced by MCS data include:
Removal of plastic from wet wipes (effective from June this year I believe)
Charge for plastic bags which has resulted in a huge reduction in use.
Deposit return scheme for bottles .
Ban on disposable vapes -from 1st June this year.
Feedback to government is also very important when these changes make a positive difference. This can include inviting MP’s and local councillors to take part in a beach cleans.
Some information from last year as follows:
1,200 surveys sent in between January and December last year.
17,000 kg litter removed by our cleans.
Evidence that plastic litter has unfortunately increased.
The Celebration Event included a very enjoyable quiz and some of the answers were interesting, for examples:
It is estimated that individual adults each generate approximately 99kg plastic waste each year in the UK. (This underlines the importance of recycling)
It is estimated that there are more micro-plastics in the ocean than stars in our galaxy.
70% our our oxygen is produced by marine plants.
In the United States most items of litter collected by beach cleans are in the form of food wrappers.
The Great British Beach Clean will take place this year between 19th and 28th September. The date for ours will be on the website and in our newsletters. Please join us!
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.
Above: Pie chart of litter collected 3rd July 2024. One of the more interesting finds was this discarded boat’s fender (below). It was found slightly outside our survey area, so whilst we removed it from the beach, it does not count as part of the weight of litter reported above.
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!
Disappearing diatoms and Sex in Copepods – Knott End Plankton round up, Spring 2024 Talks by Mark Woombs and Barry Kaye (Lancashire MCS) on Wednesday 8th May 2024 at 19:30 at Lancaster Maritime museum.
We are now into our third year studying the plankton at Knott End, and this year we are witness to a failure of the Spring phytoplankton bloom due to poor weather. Perhaps for the same reason, the copepod breeding season has been pushed back two months; though zooplankton numbers as a whole seem to be resilient… Join us to find out more!
If you would liek to check out some of the data from our plankton surveys at Knott End for yourself, there is a graphical interface on our website. This allows you to select plankton by groups or individual species, and follow how their populations have changed over the last eighteen months.
A talk by Alexandra and Jonathan Bujak (Azolla Foundation)
Above: Carp and ducks eating azolla in China. A fisherman is collecting azolla to feed his livestock. Image rendered by Victor Leshyk from the cover of ‘The Azolla Story’.
49 million years ago a plant called azolla covered the surface of the Arctic Ocean. The Arctic Azolla Event lasted 1.2 million years, during which time azolla sequestered enormous quantities of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere, and moved our planet’s climate from a greenhouse world to the ice-age climate, with permanent ice and snow at both poles…
If you would like to know more, The Azolla Story: A message from the future by Jonathan Bujak and Alexandra Bujak is available from Amazon.
Alternative Zoom meeting details are available through our Newsletter – you can subscribe here.
All are welcome, we request a donation of £4 to cover costs of room hire and speaker expenses.
Wednesday 11th January 2023 at 19:30 at LancasterMaritime Museum.
Wednesday 12th October at 19:30 at the Maritime Museum Lancaster:
A talk by by Andy Richardson (Royal Society of Biology) examining the fascinating biology, sustainability challenges and innovations behind the offshore fishery for tuna and other pelagic species.
Please be aware that the meeting room is up four flights of stairs. The lift at the Maritime museum has been repaired. Alternative Zoom meeting details are available through our Newsletter – you can subscribe here.
All are welcome, we request a donation of £4 to cover costs of room hire and speaker expenses.
Above: The sea gooseberry Pleurobrachia pileus grazing on smaller zoooplankton using two long sticky tentacles that it trails behind it (to the right of the main body above) as it swims. The smaller circular organisms are ‘sea sparkle’ (Noctiluca scintilans), between 1 and 3mm in diameter.
I am not as up on zooplankton, but thought I should follow up my earlier post on phytoplankton dynamics in the earlier part of the year with something to indicate that the zooplankton are not (too) boring! For this article I have chosen the sea gooseberry Pleurobrachia pileus which, at about 2cm in diameter, is a member of the zooplankton which is large enough to be seen – though difficult to spot in the water as it is transparent… You can often find individuals stranded as the tide goes out, but their appearance on the beach as small lumps of jelly does not do justice to them underwater. In their element they are propelled by rows of modified cillia called ‘ctenes’ – you can see eight rows of ctenes, slightly inset into the otherwise oval body of the animal in the photo above. These ctenes can refract light to give bright and continuously changing coloured displays underwater…
The population of Pleurobrachia pileus reached a peak in the Wyre estuary in early June, when small examples of Beroe cucumis first appeared in the fortnightly samples. Initially the Beroe were only a few millimeters long – very much smaller than the Pleurobrachia. Despite this they latch on to their very much larger prey, and use modified ctenes to chew or rasp flesh from the sea gooseberry. Over time, and repeated attacks, the sea gooseberry is damaged, diminished, and will eventually die.
Above: A juvenile Beroe cucumis (bottom left) latched onto a sea gooseberry, which is using its ctenes to spin rapidly in the water, to try and dislodge its predator. Photograph from the Wyre river sample of the 14th June.
Over a couple of weeks feasting on sea gooseberries the Beroe increase in size, and can reach a total length in excess of eight centimeters. The adult Beroe are able to ‘unzip’ their mouths, opening them wide enough to ingest Pleurobrachia whole, as seen in the photograph below:
Above: By the 30th June the Beroe were large enough to consume smaller sea gooseberries whole, as you can see towards the left of the picture above.
Beroe itself is not without predators, however. In the photo below (same individual as above) you can see that the beroe is in turn being eaten by a ‘megalopa’ or juvenile crab.
Above: Beroe has bumped into the sea gooseberry to the right – it is still full of one of its bretheren, hoewever, so the sea gooseberry is likely to get lucky this time! You can see that the lower surface of the Beroe is distorted where it is being attacked by a megalopa, or crab larva.
I have often seen adult crabs eating jellyfish, and spider crabs will often climb kelp at the turn of the tide to catch moon jellies or lions manes that drift past, but this is certainly the most ambitious decapod I have ever seen! What goes around, comes around…
In the German Bight the appearance of Beroe results in a near total collapse of the Pleurobrachia plieus population in a matter of weeks(1). In the Wyre the population of Pleurobrachia falls significantly, but a continuous supply of larvae in the plankton ensures that the species is still present in our samples, and indeed it was Beroe that had disappeared from the sample on the 26th July 2022.
Reference
(1) Coastal Plankton 2nd Ed. by Otto Larink and Wilfried Westheide. Published 2011 Verlag Dr Friedrich Pfiel, Munchen (ISBN 978-3-89937-127-7). p74.
