It’s come to that time and we’ve reached the end of another
survey. We’ve had a packed survey schedule and I’m really pleased with
everything we have managed to achieve over the last couple of weeks. This
includes more than 500 Hamon grab samples, and over 10 hours of video footage
collected across Farnes East MCZ and North East of Farnes Deep MCZ.
Sampled stations at Farnes East MCZ |
Completed sampling stations at Farnes East MCZ. Showing the
long-term monitoring stations set up to show trends at the site, and the mud
stations chosen to better understand the distribution so sea-pen and burrowing
megafauna communities at the site.
A surprised little Nephrops norvegicus caught on camera |
Nephrops
norvegicus builds its burrows in muddy seabed habitats. This
crustacean goes by many names, you may know it as; “Norway lobster”, “Dublin
Bay prawn”, “Langoustine”, or “Scampi”.
The next step will be to have all this raw data processed
and analysed, the results of which will be made available in a monitoring
report.
So it’s goodbye to Farnes East MCZ and North East of Farnes Deep MCZ for now, but we’ll be back!
Obligatory sunset photo from the end of the survey |