During the
past bank holiday weekend, Sea Watch Foundation held its Annual General Meeting
(AGM) in New Quay, which was a great success. The weekend consisted of various
meetings and interesting talks presented by Sea Watch staff, regional and
volunteer coordinators:
Peter Evans
– discussed the wide variety of
work that Sea Watch Foundation carries out across the UK.
Daphna
Feingold
– talked about the Cardigan Bay
bottlenose dolphin
research project and some of the important project outcomes.
Danielle Gibas
– spoke about the Sea Watch sightings database for the UK and its
advances.
Colin Bird
– talked about Orca Watch planned for the 19th- 27 th
May in
the Pentland Firth, NE Scotland
(see http://www.caithness-sea-watching.co.uk/6.html for more
details).
Colin Speedy
– discussed his interesting work with basking sharks in the Hebrides.
Robin Petch
– spoke about sightings, especially around Whitby and the initiation of a photo
identification catalogue of minke whales.
Katrin
Lohrengel
– talked about her Vodaphone World of a Difference sponsorship and volunteer
recruitment in North West England.
Rachel Lambert
– discussed the role of Sea Watch volunteers and their
work carried out here in New Quay.
On Sunday
morning we jumped on board the Dunbar Castle II for a boat trip
along the beautiful West Wales coast line to
Ynys-lochyn and back, carried out in line-transect mode. Thank you to Danielle
for arranging such beautiful weather and the numerous bottlenose dolphin
sightings for us! Four adult bottlenose
dolphins were sighted and photographed before leaving the harbour, followed by
three additional sightings during the trip (four adults and two calves, followed
by three adults and one calf, followed by two adults). A grey seal was also
sighted during the trip. Later four bottlenose dolphins were identified to be
Ghost, Floppy, Vitally and Comb.
After an
eventful weekend the Sea Watch volunteers have started another busy week in the
office in an attempt to dodge the rainy Welsh weather. On Wednesday afternoon
we had the pleasure of hearing another fascinating and gory talk given by Rod Penrose from the
UK Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme (CSIP), which aims to record
information on the cause of cetacean, marine turtle and basking shark
strandings along the UK's
coastlines using post-mortem examinations (see www.ukstrandings.org for further
information).
 |
| On Friday Rod Penrose brough a stranded sub-adult harbour porpoise found at Pwllheli to show Sea Watch volunteers. The suspected cause of death was from a bottlenose dolphin attack due to broken ribs, although further post-mortem examination is required to confirm this |
No comments:
Post a Comment