Very well done to everyone that turned up at Half Moon Bay, Heysham on Sunday 16th. Jan. to take part in the winter beach litter survey. The forecast for the weekend was very wet and windy, and sure enough the forecast was correct on Sunday morning, extremely wet. Wind and rain are not the ideal conditions for filling in recording sheets or managing flapping plastic collecting bags. The rain did ease a little whilst we were on the beach which was a help and the survey was completed successfully albeit with soggy recording sheets to decipher in the comfort of a motor car.
The Seasearch 'Guide to Seaweeds of Britain and Ireland'
Seasearch has recently released a guide to the seaweeds of Britain and Ireland. This excellent ID guide fills a space in the market. It has full colour photographs, size and location guides for over 200 seaweeds found around our coasts. Armed with this you will never need to attend a basic seaweed ID course again – so I’ll have to think of other ways of getting algae into our annual lecture series!
Best of all, there are copies available at a cut down price of (I think) £14.50 (c.f. the normal retail price of £16.95). Numbers are limited, please contact Mandy at one of our meetings to reserve yours!
We’ve got a number of papers on different aspects of biodiversity in this issue, amongst these there is an estimate of global seafloor biomass (about 100 megatons), how plankton may form specialised regional sub-species, and how diversity decreases under climatic stress (on this occasion the cooling of the poles). We’ll start, however, with a nice bit of kit that looks quite buildable for anyone wanting to take a look underwater without having to dive…
A big thank you to everyone who turned out on Sunday – unfortunately an inch of snow on the beach made it impractical to do any beach cleaning! We’ll re-schedule in January…
While bacteria, phytoplankton and sponges play an important part in this week’s scientific mix, there is still a place for some leviathans, with tales of whales both living and dead… Read the rest of this entry »
Back to basics this week, most of the science is involved with nutrition – eating and getting eaten – with a brief interlude from diatoms who are working hard on producing toxins to ensure that anyone who does eat them regrets it! The theme is picked up again in Fisheries, here our human apetite is pushing global fish stocks to the point of no return. To start though, a little fun with a novel tunicate…
Welcome to this week’s marine science briefing, which starts with a sad tail of fickle fishes, before the main course on getting about underwater. In this we see three adaptations by marine vertebrates to propulsion, including how whale design can improve underwater turbines, and what the fastest sharks would be wearing at the 2012 Olympics in London!
I was in Cleveleys this Sunday (21/11) and a on short diversion down to the beach I counted 20 dead sea mice Aphrodita aculeata on a 2 or 3 metre stretch of the hight tide strand. The tide was in so there wasn’t much beach to look at and I couldn’t tell if this was a localised collection or if it was typical of the whole shore. Got to admit that there was a bit too much dog muck on the beach for me to want to look much further!
Sea mice washed up on Cleveleys beach
miceThis was striking to me as a diver because sea mice are creatures that we rarely see. I would guess that I’ve done something of the order of 300 dives in British seas and in that time I’ve seen 3 sea mice. That’s a 1 in 100 dive ratio of sightings. So 20 – admittedly dead – in one smal area is unusual. It also has some interesting similarites to a sighting of a large number of sea mice made by Lancashire MCS members on a dive in Loch Fyne in November. Follow up dives were arranged in subsequent years to see if this was a regular occurence (I saw 2 of my total count on one of these dives) but nothing conclusive was found again. Maybe we should have been looking a bit closer to home?
What else was there on the beach? You can see a mermaid’s purse – probably a dogfish’s – in the debris behind the sea mice. I was also quite surprised to find jellyfish stranded. It’s not a time of year that I would have thought of for strandings. Didn’t see any leatherbacks though.
Leatherback turtles are popular this issue, with scientists tracking them across the Atlantic, how they thermo-regulate, and how to stop them ending up in the soup… Otherwise there is a nice bit of experimental work ‘proving’ that faster flow = more life (this doesn’t mean that low-flow = no life, however!). We are also, perhaps, getting closer to understanding why coral bleaching occurs at a molecular level.
On November 10th at our monthly meeting Barry Kaye gave an excellent illustrated talk on the Gulf Oil Spill. He explained in the most clear and concise way the complexity not only of the problem, but also of the solutions.
It quickly became clear that the human thirst for petrol and diesel driven mobility drives the demand for oil, and that if the economics are right, it will be extracted from the most inaccessible or environmentally sensitive places. The great depth of the Gulf of Mexico site produced it’s own problems, but BP was using ‘state of the art’ technology at the time. There are clearly questions about the quality of some of the technology, but we also learned that this was far from a unique case, instead it is just the latest of a series of accidents in the gulf, involving more than just the BP company.
It would seem that any idea of the Gulf spill having been ‘cleaned up’ is just a cosmetic illusion. The shores and wetlands are a very visible indication of what has been achieved there, and dispersants have removed the oil from the surface waters, but this is just a fraction of the larger impact of the spill. The less obvious but greater impact is out of sight in the mid-depth waters of the Gulf, and on the deeper sea bed. Only time will tell what the longer term impacts are on the ecology of these waters, which in turn will have an impact on surface and inshore marine life.
Gordon Fletcher.
