My Cold Water Reef Tank 💕

Since moving to Whitby I inheritted an old modest sized fish tank from a friend. I have always wanted a small tank I could house some local species and this was the ideal opportunity. 

I've had the tank for over a year now and have had many occupants! It gives me so much joy to look after the critters in there and I find it really beautiful to have in my home. Recently I collect some beadlet anemones which they spawned in the tank producing many tiny anemones. 

I've had crabs and lobsters both shed their shells in the tank and can see the growth in size between the shells. Really interesting for a marine bio geek!

Collecting new beadlet anemones for my tank. Ensuring to not damange the animal and return any rocks to orignal positions.

Lobby McLobster Face

Fishing vessel 'Our Sharon' caught a 1 in 100 million albino lobster off the coast of Scarborough this month. Recognising it's rarity he saved it from the dinner plate and handed it over to us at N-E-I-F-C-A. 

Steve organised for the lobster to be on display at the National Trust old lifeboat station in Robins Hood's Bay where they have a small display tank. The subsequently ran a lobster naming competition on facebook. 

To go with the display I produced a poster to provide information on the lobster and it's unusual shell colouration. 

Scallop Video Work Analysis

Now the data collection has been complete the analysis of data and report writing must be done.

Working in a team the other environment officers and I have begun to conduct statistically analysis and compile a report. 

With vast amounts of data there are many options to look at such as abundances, species richness and biodiversity indexes. 

I suggested looking at the height differences in Dead Man's Fingers (DMF) as I observed from the video analysis that they height in DMFs varied massively between areas with little or no scallop dredging and areas with high levels of scallop dredging. 

Using ImageJ software I measured the heights of over 1000 DMF selected from random specimins over the video footage from 2019. The data was analysed using an ANOVA which showed significant difference between areas of varying dredging activity. 

Basking Shark Encounter

On the 26th September around 1 mile of the coast of Runswick bay we had a amazing encounter with a basking shark!

I've never seen one before and I never would of thought we would encounter one off the N. Yorkshire coast. The first mate spotted it first and shouted out. I didn't believe it but jumped out my seat and ran out to the back deck to take a look. 

There it was by the side of our vessel, around 4 m long a feeding basking shark! What an amazing thing to see it feeding and relaxed alongside our boat. We floated there and watched it slowly swimming through the water. 

The encounter was uploaded to the Shark Trust Basking Shark Project. To help keep track and monitor the populations of these threatened yet beautiful animals we are luckly to encounter around the UK coastline.

https://www.sharktrust.org/basking-shark-project

Ceatacean Watch UK

This summer we have seen an array of different ceatacean in relatively high abundances. We've seen bottlenose dolpins, harbour porpoises and minke whales. 

One particular encounter was around 10 miles of the coast of Whitby where we were surrounded by 10-12 feeding minke whales. As Skipper tracked the bait ball on the fish finder, I was flying the drone to attempt to capture the feeding behaviour of these majestic creatures. 

Unfortionatley, it proved to be too difficult this time around to capture any great footage but the experience was exhilerating. Next time I will get the footage I wanted after some futher practice. 

I uploaded all sightings of ceatacean to Sea Watch Foundation UK, a citizen science project aimed to "improve the conservation of whales, dolphins and porpoises in the seas around Britain and Ireland."

https://www.seawatchfoundation.org.uk/recentsightings/