New Volunteer Training

It’s been a busy week here at Sea Watch! Three new volunteers have arrived to join the team and replace those who finished their placement. Indeed, it was mainly a week of training in field work and data protocols; because even if our enthusiastic volunteers all have some degree of experience in the marine field, it is necessary that everyone be on the same page.


During the week, our new recruits were introduced in detail to the work Sea Watch Foundation does in Cardigan Bay and beyond, with its coordination efforts of the observer network in the whole of UK and Ireland (which new blog readers may be interested in discovering here). Then they were trained in various protocols of data collection, including, for instance:

• Land watches from the New Quay pier, where dolphin sightings and boat encounters help scientists understand the use cetaceans make of the harbour, and how best animals and humans may coexist in coastal environments;
• Dolphin encounters on boat trips or dedicated surveys, emphasizing how to best estimate the number of animals encountered and their behaviour, and also how to take good note of the observation effort. This is a very important piece of information as it may influence the data collected; it is a truism to say that with clearer conditions, you might spot more dolphins, but it has to be taken into account when studying the data. Hence, it is necessary to know whether the visibility was good, whether the reflection of the sun on the water might hamper your sightings, and so on.

But all this is theory, and nothing is better than practice! One important piece of information to gather is the distance between you and the dolphins sighted, and estimating distances precisely with the naked eye is a lot more difficult than it seems. The volunteers were thus taken around town and asked to estimate various distances for a small practice session – it must have been a funny sight for the residents and tourists of New Quay to see this small group going around town with very concentrated faces and shouting distances to one another! All this training was concluded by an informal exam, when they were shown short footage of dolphin groups in various conditions and asked to judge in one short look the number of individuals, group composition, and sea state – that is, all the data that will make the observations both reliable and valuable. It is a bit like passing your driver’s license all over again – but in a more ecological way! Now, after being teamed up for their first shifts with experienced volunteers, they are ready to go on their own with a trained eye, ensuring that they miss nothing on their shifts.


Beyond the interesting and sometimes funny aspect of such training, all this emphasizes a very fundamental aspect of scientific work: the paramount need for consistency and reliability in the data collected, especially when it comes from the field and multiple people. When sea conditions are not ideal and you have to think quickly on your feet, ensuring that the protocols become reflexes makes things more comfortable and greatly reduces the risk of mistakes. This goes a very long way to help making informed decisions about wildlife management and conservation in the Cardigan Bay waters.

By Lionel (volunteer)