Join us for four days of marine recording on the shores of Cornwall’s beautiful and under-recorded north coast.  

In 2011 the Porcupine Marine Natural History Society helped to fund a survey expedition to this part of Cornwall. Weather conditions were frustrating and everyone involved was tantalised by what they found but wanted to explore further. This area of the coast has had little previous study, particularly in recent years, which has made it hard to push for better protection, such as Marine Conservation Zones.

Tides:

Saturday  15^th September 11:33, 0.9m

Sunday  16^th September 12:12, 0.6m

Monday  17^th September 12:50, 0.4m

Tuesday  18^th September 13:31, 0.4m

On the Sunday we will join the St Agnes Marine Conservation Group for their annual rocky shore survey, helping to provide records for the St Agnes Voluntary Marine Conservation Area.

As well as intertidal trips to a variety of shores, there is also a chance to take part in Seasearch diving and subtidal collecting. There are 2 boats (north coast RIB, south coast hard boat) with 2 dives per day from each.  We will have a range of dive site options to suit different weather conditions. Divers will be allocated spaces on one of the boats unless you state a strong preference for one or other.

Please click for more information on costs, accommodation and directions and for the booking form:  Porcupine Society Autumn Field Meeting 2012 invitation and booking form.

The Deep is an award winning visitor attraction and one of the world’s most spectacular aquariums, as such it provides an excellent venue in which to hold this year’s conference. During lunch and coffee breaks delegates will have access to the Tropical Lagoon, Coral Realm, Timeline and Slime Upper sections of The Deep, as well as poster presentations.

The Conference Dinner will also be held at The Deep. On arrival delegates will be able to take a private tour of the lower section of the aquarium, including the Twilight zone, Kingdom of Ice, Amazon Life and walk through the underwater tunnel. The underwater lift will then be taken to The Observatory, where a three-course meal will be served.  The last booking date for the conference dinner will be Wednesday 14th March. Click here for the Menu Choices. 

Make sure you register now for the Annual Conference in Hull for a chance to see this line up of interesting speakers:

• Kirsten Smith – Marine Conservation Zones – North Sea Persepective.
• Chris Barrett  – Intertidal Fish Ecology.
• Louise Firth – Extreme environmental conditions & intertidal organisms: examples from two case studies in the sub-tropics.
• Rob Spray – Seaweed East & Seasearch
• Mike Elliott – The problems and benefits of using taxonomic information in marine research and management’.
• Andy Mackie – Polychaete taxonomy – back to the future.
• Emily Priestley & Angie Gall-“Sea stacks, Sponges & Seaweeds” – North Cornwall Coastal underwater survey week, May 2011.
• Susan Chambers- Chaetozone Taxonomy.
• Cath Waller-Development of Antarctic Intertidal Communities.
• Frank Evans – Transatlantic oceanographic voyage of 1953 by boat and raft.
• Frank Evans- Trans-Cullercoats Bay film of 15 minutes.
• David McCandless – Challenges and opportunities of the IFCA.
• Natasha Bhatia – Valuing Ecosystem Services and Societal Benefits in Estuarine Environments.
• Sonja Oberbeckmann – Plastic pollution and marine microbes: Identifying plastic colonisers in the ocean.
• Ellen Bell – Copper: from molecular biomarkers to behaviour.
• Roger Uglow – Life in an alien environment: husbanding post harvest crustacean shellfish.
• Anita Franco – Taxonomical vs. functional approach to the study of fish assemblages in transitional waters.
• Rafa Perez Domingues – Taxonomic skills in fieldwork- special requirements using fish.
• Fiona Crouch – Tristan da Cunha Survey.
• Kat Sanders – Yorkshire Wildlife Trust & Undersea Explorers.
• William MacLennan – Local area & Conservation Status.
• The Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science – Plankton identification of Continuous Plankton Recorder samples: A taxonomic journey.
• James Thorpe (Thomson Unicomarine) - title to be confirmed
  
• APEM - title to be confirmed

Paula says “There are shore diving options, and maybe RIB diving. Air fills £2.50 from Donkey Divers. It’d be good to hear from anyone else who’s interested in diving, or any one who’s dived Guernsey before and can recommend good sites!”

Please contact Paula if you are interested either via email p.lightfoot@btinternet.com or through the PMNHS Facebook page

Friday and Saturday will be the normal sessions of oral and poster presentations. We are hoping to confirm the programme and speakers by the end of January.

Sunday will involve a field trip to Thornwick Bay (lunch included) with the use of Hull University labs afterwards for sample/specimen examination.

The Provisional theme is “Why Marine Taxonomy?”

Please send offers of talks and posters to Ann Leighton (Ann.Leighton@hull.ac.uk).

The Conference fee will be £50, to include refreshments morning & afternoon, lunch at the Deep on Friday and Saturday, as well as Fish & Chips on Sunday and coach travel to and from Thornwick Bay on Sunday

The Conference dinner on the Friday night will be at the Deep Two Rivers Restaurant, preceded by a private tour of the Deep (cost £35).

Here is the Conference 2012 Hull Booking Form.

Field Meeting April 2012

   Guernsey, Channel Islands

Thursday 5^th – Tuesday 10^th April 2012

 Guernsey (49°28’ N, 2° 35’ W), the second largest of the Channel Islands at around 25 square miles (65 km²), lies 27 miles northwest of Jersey and 30 miles off the French (Normandy) coast. The spectacular coastline is about 25 miles in length and has granitic cliffs to the south and southeast, but is flatter to the west and north, with a series of large sandy bays. The Channel Islands have long been of interest to marine natural historians; for example, Koehler (1886) published a three-part collection of “Contributions to the study of the littoral fauna of the Anglo-Norman Islands (Jersey, Guernsey, Herm, and Sark)” in volume 18 of series 5 of the Annals & Magazine of Natural History.

The tidal range is large; 10 m at Spring tides. The tides at Easter 2012 are among the best of the year and ideal for intertidal sampling.

Tides: April (BST adjusted) – Easter

Water quality in the Channel Islands is excellent, however, tidal currents are strong. On Springs the maximum tidal flow (high/low water) can reach 5 knots! Although the fieldtrip is focused on the intertidal, diving may be a possibility if there is sufficient interest (see below).

Dredging may also be possible if we can secure a suitable and affordable vessel one day.

Laboratory: A laboratory will be set up in the ‘Reading Room’ at Les Cotils, St Peter Port, from the 5th-10th April 2012: http://www.lescotils.com/the_reading_room

Accommodation:
There is no requirement to stay at Les Cotils.  Some participants may wish to stay elsewhere.  Porcupine is not taking responsibility for arranging accommodation for attendees. Costs at Les Cotils (1st April ­– 31 October 2012) are:

Bed and breakfast: standard room £41.00 per person, Sea view £45.50 per person
Bed breakfast and evening meal: Standard room £53.00 per person, Sea view £57.50 per person.

These prices are slightly higher (£2.50-4.00) than those currently on the website for 2011:

http://www.lescotils.com/room_tariffs

If you are interested in staying at Les Cotils, you can book online (1 night deposit):
https://portals.uk.rezlynx.net/lescotilspportal/wfrmpakquery.aspx?siteid=lescotils

Les Cotils is up-hill at St Peter Port, but is in easy walking distance of restaurants etc.

Other accommodation: http://www.visitguernsey.com/

Getting there:

Information here: http://www.lescotils.com/travel_information
and here: http://www.visitguernsey.com/transport/
Rough estimates of travel costs are around £250-300 return for a car (2 adults) by ferry. There are fast 2.5 hr and slow ferries (variable 7-12+ hrs depending on sailing time) from Weymouth or Portsmouth; fast one a little more weather susceptible: http://www.condorferries.co.uk/Media/Timetables.html ). Flights are ‘around’ £100 (est. £80-120) from various airports (e.g., in the south – Bristol, Gatwick, Southampton: 45-80 minutes), but excess baggage is likely to be expensive! If you fly, you will need transport from the airport to St Peter Port.

Getting around:
We are hoping that some attendees and perhaps some Guernsey participants will have cars and be willing to help transport people to the shores.
There is (currently) a bus service too, though apparently the renewal of contracts is up in the air just now (contract ends 31st March!).

Cars can be hired on Guernsey too, but hopefully this will not be necessary.

Costs:
The cost (to cover lab costs etc) will be £50 for the period; deposit of £10 required on booking.

Should diving or dredging be possible, some additional costs will likely arise for the participants involved

Booking:

To book your place please fill out the booking form(see below) and send a cheque for £10 (deposit)

made payable to the Porcupine Marine Natural History Society

to:  Andy Mackie, Marine Biodiversity, National Museum Wales, Cathays Park, Cardiff CF10 3NP

(andy.mackie@museumwales.ac.uk)

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

If you are interested in attending:

• Book early, send in the booking form now!

• It is imperative that you book your accommodation as soon as possible (for those interested in diving, see next point). Guernsey at Easter can be popular. Do not leave things until the last minute as you may be disappointed.

 • Diving: If you are interested in diving, it is vital that we hear from you a.s.a.p.  Diving will only be organised (by Sue Daly and Fiona Crouch) if enough participants are obtained to make it a viable operation.  Note also that diving operations are likely to be based on Sark, not Guernsey. Accommodation on Sark will be investigated once we know whether diving is an option.

Enticing images from the Channel Islands

Richard Lord: http://www.sealordphotography.net/Nature

Sue Daly: http://www.suedalyproductions.com/

Porcupine Field Meeting 2012

 Guernsey

Thursday 5^th – Tuesday 10^th April 2012

 All this information and the booking form can be downloaded here as a word document and here as a pdf file.

Applications will be considered for any small project falling within the objectives of the Society.

This Society seeks to promote interest in the ecology, taxonomy, and distribution of marine fauna and flora in the N.E. Atlantic.

Projects may be field-based, or pursued in a laboratory or museum. The projects could vary from basic sorting and identification, to specialist taxonomic/biological/ecological study of a particular taxon, group of taxa, or habitat.

Projects may concern any marine or estuarine environment, however, the PMNHS Council would welcome applications to study the Discovery Collections at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), Southampton . These include a great variety of both sorted and unsorted samples, containing many unique and exotic animals from the open ocean and the deep sea of the Porcupine Seabight and Porcupine Abyssal Plain.  The Collections provide an exciting research opportunity that could lead to the discovery of species new to science. As they are used primarily for ecological research, the Collections are currently ordered so that whole samples, and hence communities, may be examined, rather than ranked by taxon, as in most museums. The samples have been collected using both quantitative and semi-quantitative gear, such as multicorers, box corers and acoustically monitored epibenthic sledges, otter trawls and midwater nets. They provide important base-line data on the deep-sea environment for measuring ecosystem change and for studying local and regional biodiversity.  Discovery samples would normally be worked on at NOC in Southampton, but may be studied in alternative approved institutions on a loan basis. Please contact Dr Tammy Horton (Discovery Collections Manager; tammy.horton@noc.ac.uk) for further details if you would like to submit a proposal to study this material.

The purpose of any project would be to make information more accessible to the wider community, and therefore a written summary (e.g., a report for the newsletter and website) of any work undertaken will be expected, and a talk at the annual Porcupine Conference strongly encouraged.

The fund may be used for research and reporting costs only; applicants are expected to meet their own living expenses and time costs. Purchase of equipment is not an eligible cost.

Eligibility

Applications will be accepted from students, researchers, or any person willing and able to carry out the necessary research; under appropriate supervision if that is deemed necessary. Applicants should be members of the Porcupine Marine Natural History Society (you do not have to be a current member, but must join the society to be eligible). These grants are open to all, irrespective of status, whether professional or amateur marine biologist or environmentalist. Projects will be excluded which are part of the professional work of the applicant or are part of an undergraduate or post-graduate degree programme.

Application

The application for grant should include:

• a full description of the proposed project
• when and where the project will be carried out
• the proposed timescale to complete the project
• the expected outcomes which will result from your project
• proposed publication plans for the results of the project
• a full CV of the applicant, together with details of relevant experience or training
• detailed proposed expenditure for the project (may include additional funding sources)

All proposals will be assessed by a panel from the PMNHS Council, and the best proposal(s) granted. The Council reserves the right to not grant any projects in any one round of applications.

Applications must be submitted by 29th February 2012 - late applications will not be admitted.

Please send applications to:

Dr Andrew Mackie, Chairman, Porcupine Marine Natural History Society

Amgueddfa Cymru — National Museum Wales, Cathays Park, Cardiff CF10 3NP

(by post or e-mail:Andrew.Mackie@museumwales.ac.uk)

Join us for four days of marine recording on the shores of Cornwall’s beautiful and under-recorded north coast.  

In 2011 the Porcupine Marine Natural History Society helped to fund a survey expedition to this part of Cornwall. Weather conditions were frustrating and everyone involved was tantalised by what they found but wanted to explore further. This area of the coast has had little previous study, particularly in recent years, which has made it hard to push for better protection, such as Marine Conservation Zones.

Tides:

Saturday  15^th September 11:33, 0.9m

Sunday  16^th September 12:12, 0.6m

Monday  17^th September 12:50, 0.4m

Tuesday  18^th September 13:31, 0.4m

On the Sunday we will join the St Agnes Marine Conservation Group for their annual rocky shore survey, helping to provide records for the St Agnes Voluntary Marine Conservation Area.

As well as intertidal trips to a variety of shores, there is also a chance to take part in Seasearch diving and subtidal collecting. There are 2 boats (north coast RIB, south coast hard boat) with 2 dives per day from each.  We will have a range of dive site options to suit different weather conditions. Divers will be allocated spaces on one of the boats unless you state a strong preference for one or other.

Please click for more information on costs, accommodation and directions and for the booking form:  Porcupine Society Autumn Field Meeting 2012 invitation and booking form.

Tammy

We will be based at the Sandwich Bird Observatory which is located in the middle of the two sites we plan to visit, the mudflats off Whitstable to the North and the unique chalk rocky shore at St. Margaret’s Bay to the south

The plan is to visit St. Margaret’s Bay on the 3rd (LW 1023: 1.0 m) and Whitstable on the 4th (LW 1129: 1.0 m). Microscopes will be set up at the observatory for people to bring back samples for further examination.

If you like birds as well as marine life then this is a great time to visit the Observatory as it is the beginning of the migration. The observatory has a walk planned for the Sunday and bird ringers will be in action over the weekend. There are also opportunities to go and visit the wind farms off the Thanet coast. Please let me know if you require more details.

Accomodation

Kent is a tourist hotspot so there is plenty of accommodation to choose from see here. There is also basic and very reasonable accommodation at the Observatory. I have block booked the 5 twin rooms and family room for Porcupiners. The twin rooms cost £25 per night and the family room which has 6 beds costs £35 per night. Rates are per room not per person so very reasonable. Details can be found on the Sandwich Bird Observatory website. Accommodation is self catering with kitchen facilities. The Observatory is approximately 30 minutes walk from Sandwich.

We will be organizing a group dinner on Saturday night if you would like to join us.

This is the first time the PMNHS has visited Kent so it should be an interesting trip for both old and new Porcupine members.

NATIONAL OCEANOGRAPHY CENTRE, SOUTHAMPTON 11TH-13TH MARCH 2011

Porcupine recently held its annual conference at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. There were two days of talks (Friday 11th and Saturday 12th March, 2011) followed by an excursion/field trip on the Sunday. The theme of the conference was “A Celebration of Marine Life” which reflected the passion of all of our membership, and linked conveniently with the recent culmination of the decade of discovery by the Census of Marine Life.

The conference was very well-attended with 108 delegates, and had a full schedule of 26 talks. Speakers came from a wide variety of disciplines and gave excellent talks on so many different subjects. It was a privilege to hear about the many and varied projects being carried out around our coasts (and beyond). We had three presentations covering aspects of the Census of Marine Life including Seamounts, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and a general overview of the Census from Professor Paul Tyler. We were also lucky to have presentations from participants on the 2010 Porcupine Isles of Scilly Field trip, covering fish, polychaetes and more fish! There were presentations with a local focus too, with seals, seagrass and surfing all being tackled.

To download the full abstract booklet please click here

For a PDF summary of Keith Hiscock’s ‘Lundy – Marine life highlights and science achievements 1971-2011′ presentation, download here.

For a PDF summary of Jolyon Chesworth’s ‘Tracking the Solent’s Seals’ presentation, download here.

For a PDF summary of Doug Herdson’s ‘Big fish and little fish a celebration of the icthyofauna of the Isles of Scilly’ presentation, download here.

For a PDF summary of Amy Dale’s ‘Seagrass in the Solent’ presentation, download here.