Swap your flip-flops for some steel toe-capped boots, we’re going on
survey!
As summer pushes on, it’s that
time of year again for a joint survey between JNCC and Marine Scotland Science.
Survey staff will live and work on the research vessel MRV Scotia for 26 days in the Scottish offshore waters. The joint
team plan to visit the Faroe Shetland Sponge Belt Nature Conservation Marine
Protected Area (NCMPA), Wyville Thomson Ridge Special Area of Conservation
(SAC) and Rosemary Bank Seamount NCMPA. The purpose of this survey is to continue
to add to our monitoring efforts to understand more about these important sites
and provide sound management advice.
Figure 1: Location of the sites to be surveyed
The Faroe Shetland Sponge Belt MPA
has multiple protected features including deep-sea sponge aggregations and the
bivalve, Ocean quahog (Arctica islandica).
It is the largest of the three sites the team plan to visit, at approximately
188 km in length, and is located on the Scottish side of the Faroe-Shetland
Channel.
Figure 2: Lamellate sponges (Porifera) on deep sea sediments of the
Faroe-Shetland Sponge Belt MPA
The Rockall Trough carves around
the western edge of the United Kingdom and Ireland, opening out into the
Porcupine Abyssal Plain in the south and meeting a series of features in
Scottish offshore waters in the North. Wyville Thomson Ridge SAC represents a
rocky plateau to the north-east of the Rockall Trough. The site is home to
extensive areas of protected stony reef, which in turn host diverse biological
communities including sponges, soft corals, beds of feather stars and sea
cucumbers, to name a few.
Figure 3: A section of reef from the Wyville Thomson Ridge SAC, dominated
by the feather star Heliometra glacialis
Rosemary Bank Seamount MPA is
also located to the north-east of the Rockall Trough and is an extinct volcano,
taller than Ben Nevis. Seamounts are characteristically hotspots of marine life
due to their conical shape and the related effects on local currents which
supply the feature with nutrients. Rosemary Bank Seamount MPA has rich
communities consisting of deep-sea sponge aggregations, a variety of coral
species and deep-water fish, such as orange roughy.
Figure 4: An orange roughy with some deep-sea corals on Rosemary Bank
seamount MPA. Image courtesy of the NERC funded Deep Links Project- Plymouth
University, Oxford University, JNCC & BGS
To gather further information
about these sites, the team will use a variety of sampling equipment. Video
tows and drop-cameras will be used to collect live footage and high-resolution
images of the seabed and its inhabitants. The survey will also use a Hamon grab
to take samples of the seabed for particle size analysis of the substratum and identification of
the animals living within the sediment.
Watch this space, the JNCC Twitter and
Marine
Scotland Twitter feeds and
JNCC Facebook, for further updates before and
during the survey!
Survey
Fun Fact:
The Wyville Thomson Ridge was named after Professor Sir
Charles Wyville Thomson. He had a decorated education in Natural History before
being granted permission from the Royal Navy to modify and use one of their
ships, HMS Challenger, to explore the
underwater world. During the 1870s, the Challenger Expedition achieved
ground-breaking work in marine science and is considered by many to be the
flagship of oceanography. Read more here:
Written by Emily Sym
