Photograph of Matt and a floating offshore wind power installation, 2024.
Offshore Wind is one of the fastest growing industries worldwide. Many nations have set ambitious targets for rapid build out of large-scale offshore wind projects in an effort to accelerate the decarbonisation of their electricity supply.
This talk will discuss the challenges and opportunities that these projects represent on a global scale, their impact in the context of the local marine environment and an overview of the technology involved in achieving our targets sustainably.
This meeting wil be conducted online only – further details in our Newsletter.
Above: 2024 MCS Christmas quiz, background photo SS Carnatic by Lewis Bambury.
Pit your wits against our quizmaster over a range of general knowledge topics – a chance to unwind from Christmas Shopping and other seasonal stresses!
A talk by Mark Woombs (Lancashire MCS) on Wednesday 9th October 2024 at 19:30
The Red Sea is unique. Its diverse reefs are in stark contrast to the severe desert landscape. Many of the species found there are endemic, that is they occur nowhere else on our planet. The Red Sea has so far proven resistant to coral bleaching due to the corals higher temperature tolerance. Is this still the case or are things about to change?
Our third annual visit to Conger Rock was on Saturday 21st September, the early morning start being made very much more bearable by the rare appearance of some sunshine! Our walks are nice social occasions, but also allow us to check on the state of the honeycomb worm reefs which can grow to be substantial structures close to extreme low water.
The photo above by Lewis shows one of the honeycomb worm reefs with Conger Rock, and other members of the group, in the background. The reefs close to Conger Rock were rather smaller than on previous years, few being more than 10cm tall. More substantial reefs, up to 40cm tall were present closer to the the extreme low water mark.
The reefs are relatively short-lived structures – probably reaching a maximum size, with a height over half a meter, and extending for many tens of meters, after four or five years growth. After this time the rate of erosion from winter storms starts to dominate over the slow growth of the reef, perhaps as the founding worm population gets older, or simply that the larger reef size becomes unstable in the face of winter storms.
We held our annual GBBC at Half Moon Bay, Heysham as usual on the 22nd September. We had a great turn out of volunteers and many thanks to everyone who came.
Over the last few years, we have found the beach quite clean and volumes of litter have been low. This time, the beach was exceptionally clean and we cleaned away in total 0.9 kg. (0.4kg & 0.5kg from the two surveyed areas. The weight was greatly enhanced by bagged dog-poo!
As always, the greatest proportion of litter was in the form of plastic bits. Although these may seem innocuous, these little bits can be a real danger to marine life and birds. So good work from our volunteers in getting these things off the beach.
Weather-wise we were treated kindly and it was an enjoyable morning. We hope to see people again on the next beach clean on 7th December.
Kathy MacAdam
Posted: September 26th, 2024
Posted in Beach Clean
Saturday 21st September between 1 pm to 3 pm at Morecambe Beach.
Channel 5 are following The Raford Family as they clean a section of their local beach. The beach clean will be carried out by all the family and as many people can join as they like. The footage used will be incorporated into the Channel 5 Documentary “22 Kids and Counting”
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!
The Bioblitz allows many disciplines to work together to identify and document the various wildlife species present in the Wyre Estuary Country Park and wider district, running for 24 hours from 12:00 on the Friday to 12:00 on Saturday; this year’s event was run over the 14th and 15th of June. In addition to the identification activity this year there was a marquee tent open to the public on the Saturday for local wildlife and environmental organisations to have stands, and Lancashire MCS were invited to use one of these as well as helping with some of the identification. So on the Saturday Kathy, Hilary and Lewis managed the stand and, after helping set things up, Barry helped with some of the microscopy.
As well as the usual leaflets, information and pin badges we had a range of craft activities prepared for the kids (and us bigger kids). These were well received and we had steady flow of people visiting the stand, at least until the weather took an extreme turn with a heavy thunder storm that seemed to drive a lot of people home and slow things down. It was an enjoyable day and I think that we would love to do it all again, preferably without the storm, not that we would have any control over that.
19:30 Wednesday 12th May 2024 at Lancaster Maritime Museum
Above: Students from Blackpool and Fylde College – (L to R) Bradley Cooke, Jack Dyson and Scarlett Henson. Background – filter feeding mussels (Mytilus edulis) at Roa Island.
This month sees the last of our current series of presentations, and on this occasion we are pleased to cede the floor to the up-coming generation of marine biologists, with presentations from students of Blackpool and Fylde College. I hope you will be able to come along to provide them with a friendly environment to practice speaking in public about their scientific projects:
Microplastic contamination of Mytilus edulis by Scarlett Henson Infection of mackerel by Anisakis Parasites by Bradley Cooke The Impact of pH on coral growth by Jack Dyson
