We’ve just added our events diary for January to May 2011 – some good talks to look forward to plus lots of things to get involved with: beach cleans, our annual photo comp., coastal walks and dive/walking/survey trips up to the West Coast of Scotland.

MCS Diary

This issue we look at the behaviour of seals and jellyfish – choose the ideal holiday destination for starfish – then dive into a microbial ocean. How to manage fisheries, this time on a Chilean archipelago (there are some mitigating circumstances here, but best of luck guys), and catch up on more news from the Gulf of Mexico. One factor that we need to take on board is that the Gulf was in bad shape before the spill, and that the $20B oil spill response isn’t going to start managing the Gulf ecology properly.

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The Lune Deeps are not known for crystal clear visibility. To dive here you have to have the right weather, the right tides, and these have to coincide with time that you can spare to go diving. I have to admit that it would be a first for me. So I was very lucky to get a phone call from Ian at Darwen SAC inviting me on a survey dive in the Deeps. This did mean getting up at 4:00 am a couple of days later on an October Sunday morning, in order to get to Knott End in time to launch for the high tide slack water, but these opportunities don’t come up very often and I grabbed it while I could.  

Setting up gear in the car park, it had the feeling of a night dive in the dark. Boats launched, we set off for the chosen site with the sun rising above Blackpool, turning the sky over the bay shades of pink. Fantastic – as a diver what more can you ask for?  

Well there’s the dive. The plan was to drop to the sea bed at about 10m just out of the deeps, and to swim over the edge and down the slope; each buddy pair to have a surface marker buoy visible. Things went pretty much to plan for us, we found the sea bed and managed to work down the slope to 30m. We could have gone deeper but my – borrowed – computer had run out of no-stop time and I was wary of running it into decompression. 

So, what was it like? Where we started the sea bed had quite a few fist sized pebbles and was silty enough that any misplaced fin kick would reduce visibility to zero; this wasn’t too much of a problem as the tide was running fast enough to move us smartly along and clear the silt away. At the end of the dive we got a glimpse of a clearer, more gravelly sea bed. Throughout one of the most striking things was that the dominant species was bryzoan Hornwrack Flustra foliacea, which is quite an unusual habitat to find yourself diving. The silt covering meant that much of the benthic fauna was difficult to discern, but there was still plenty to see, with numerous Coryphella nudibranchs and even a large Triton Sea Slug Tritonia hombergi. As well as some butterfish and a greater pipefish we did find an area with quite a few goldsinny wrasse, which was a bit of a surprise; several people reported seeing large dogfish.  

An interesting dive, but considering the size of the area that we covered there is still plenty of the deeps undived and waiting to be explored. Would I do it again – certainly.

A real mixed-bag this week, our marine science highlights consider techniques for identifying viruses (or molecular quasi-species) and nanotech trackers to follow zooplankton. In conservation, we see progress on a new generation of bioreactors that promise to remove nitrogen from land runoff. In fisheries, even the best environmental practices at fish farms need improvement. In pollution, science of the gulf oil spill in the service of the law.

For those of you who worry about climate change, but feel they can’t do anything about it right now, we finish with the opportunity to transcribe the logs of British warships from the turn of the last century. The transcriptions will extend our baseline data about climate back in time over a wide area of the Earth’s surface, and so improve the qualty of our climatic forecasts.
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This week we start at the beginning of the marine food web – with algae blooming in the SW Atlantic, and plumbing the depths around Hawaii. In marine exploitation we see plans to mine hydrothermal vents in Papua New Guinea. Conservation worries in the Indian Ocean, with extensive bleaching now occurring due to high water temperatures. Coccolithophores make a guest appearance in climate change – responsible for absorbing large amounts of the CO₂ we’re pumping into the atmosphere – an understanding of their biology takes on global significance…

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Lots of stuff in this roundup in which we travel in time from an up-to-date science review from the gulf oil spill (handy for next month’s talks!) back to ancient cnidaria. Exciting changes in fisheries protection for the US Pacific fleet, which is to see the number of boats reduced to match the number of fish that can be legally caught. More on the formation of shoals – what is the cost of grouping together for protection? To start, however, a first glimpse into the life of one of the largest groups of marine organisms – the bacteria:
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Lots of pollution – the Deepwater Horizon was now the largest spill ever (official). Problems with policing conservation policy. How alike are flocks and shoals? Read on…
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Members of the Group joined forces with members of the Morecambe & Heysham Soroptomists organisation on Saturday 18th. September to conduct a beach clean and litter survey at Half Moon Bay, Heysham. The survey was part of  a National survey of beach litter organised by the Marine Conservation Society over the weekend 18/19th.  Sept. This annual event attracts thousands of volunteers to clean and record the litter on hundreds of beaches all around the UK coast.  Litter on Britain’s  beaches has more than doubled since the surveys began in the early 1990’s. Most items of  litter recorded , in excess of 60%  are made from plastic and in the region of 40%  of the litter is left by visitors who come to enjoy the beach. We hold quarterly litter surveys at Half Moon Bay, Heysham,  the next one will be on Sunday 19th. December 2010 at11.30am. Why not come along and help?

Photo. images by kind permission of Christine Fletcher.

The centre of a modern city is not usually where you’d expect to find wildlife, but when the city is a port, like Liverpool, the dock areas provide a suitable habitat for a wide range of life!

The footage (linked below) was posted by BBC North West Tonight, and originaly broadcast on Tuesday 14th September 2010. Well worth a look, especially if you thought that old shopping trolleys were the only things you’d be likely to find! The video shows a colourful range of local and imported wildlife:

Underwater video in the Albert dock

A good couple of weeks of marine science here – from fun to fundamental stuff, and often both together! Fundamental and important is the possibility that studies of nitrogen uptake in the marine ecosystem may have have underestimated the amounts of nitrogen being fixed by marine organisms. Fundamental and fun – well, take your choice from scampering scallops to the secretive sex-life of snails!

In conservation the emerging issue is deep-sea bottom trawling; there doesn’t seem to be any way of controlling this, so I guess the industry will continue until the stocks crash, taking an entire ecosystem with them (if you care, buy fish from sustainable sources – this does not include any deep sea species!). In pollution the important stories are still with the Gulf Oil Slick, with the publication of BP’s report into the accident, and some interesting strands in the debate as to where the oil has gone…

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