1. science
2. biology

Summer 2014
The power of citizen science:
or how to maintain a long term
record with voluntary help
As was recounted in an earlier edition of the Newsletter, citizen science is being
used more frequently to collect data and carry out important conservation tasks.
The Continuous Plankton Recorder survey is an early example of citizen science and
shows what can be achieved.
Most people can name a person in
their lives who has inspired them
and perhaps steered them into a
particular career. In my case I would
name Alister Hardy as someone
who had a big influence on my
career. When still at school I read
his book The Open Sea: The World
of Plankton (1956) and was thrilled
by his enthusiasm and his amazing
descriptions of life in the open
ocean. Hardy illustrated the book
with many watercolour paintings of
planktonic animals and their beauty
captured my imagination. I think
that many people who have read the
book have had the same experience.
Whilst in the Antarctic on
the Discovery expedition, which
aimed to understand better the
environment of whales, Hardy
designed a machine to take
continuous samples of plankton. His
prototype was large and unwieldy
but allowed him to do transects
spanning out from South Georgia
to plot the changing abundance of
plankton in the upper layers of the
ocean. Doing the same with conical
plankton nets was much harder with
a ship like the Discovery, which was
slow and hard to keep on station.
On returning to the UK, Hardy
moved to the University of Hull,
Alister Hardy on the RRS Discovery with his first design of the
continuous plankton recorder
where he was the founding Professor
in the Department of Zoology. His
interest in fisheries and plankton
set him thinking about how fishers
could be helped to find good
concentrations of fish. In his first
job at the Fisheries Laboratory,
Lowestoft in the early 1920s,
Hardy had studied the biology and
fisheries of herring in the North
Sea. One of his observations was
that herring were rarely found in
dense patches of phytoplankton but
were naturally attracted to patches
of zooplankton such as Calanus
finmarchicus. This led Hardy to
reason that if one could map the ➤
The copepod Calanus finmarchicus, an important food source for
many temperate fish species
CONTENTS: Piet Sevenster’s career ... 3 Editorial ... 4 Robert Wootton’s Obituary ... 5 Travel Grant Reports ... 7 Notices ... 8
The Continuous Plankton Recorder used in
the survey from 1931 to the present. Small
modifications have been made since 1931
to improve stability
➤ distribution of plankton it might
be possible to inform fishers of the
best place to set their nets to catch
herring. To achieve the sampling
required, which needed to be rapid
and synoptic, Hardy redesigned
his continuous plankton recorder
so that it could be towed behind
merchant vessels that regularly
crossed the North Sea. This was
the beginning of what has now
become the Continuous Plankton
Recorder (CPR) survey, which has
been running now for 84 years.
The merchant ships that tow the
recorders are not paid and it is
partly through the generosity of the
shipping companies that the survey
has survived so long.
When Hardy left Hull the CPR
survey moved to Edinburgh where
it was part of the Scottish Marine
Biological Association. During
this period the survey came under
the jurisdiction of the Natural
Environment Research Council
and under its direction the survey
was moved in the early 1970s to
Plymouth where it became part
of a new Institute for Marine
Environmental Research. In
the 1980s NERC was revising its
activities and decided to shut down
the CPR survey. Several people,
mostly those concerned with climate
change, were horrified at NERC’s
short sighted view and set up the
Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for
Ocean Science (or SAHFOS: http://
www.sahfos.ac.uk/sahfos-home.
aspx) to take over the work and to
continue the survey. Subsequently
NERC revised its view of the survey
and now provides a portion of its
funding. The other large funder is
Defra and there is input from the
Canadian Department of Fisheries
and Oceans, NOAA in the US and
the Institute for Marine Research in
Norway.
The survey identifies around 500
different taxa on a mostly monthly
sampling interval covering the North
Sea and a large part of the North
Atlantic. It now also has routes in
the north Pacific, in the Antarctic,
south of Australia and off southwest
Africa. Significant changes in the
North Atlantic plankton community
have been demonstrated using the
CPR database, some with significant
effects on fish populations. For
example, in the North Sea the coldwater copepod Calanus finmarchicus
has retreated further north as water
temperatures have increased,
with its place being taken by C.
helgolandicus, which prefers warmer
water. The former has its early life
history stages in the plankton at
the same time that cod larvae are
in the plankton and in need of food
supplies. The early stages of C.
helgolandicus appear later in the
year and are not available to the cod
larvae. As a result, cod recruitment
has been affected by this change,
compounding the direct effects of
climate change and of course,
➤
The copepod Calanus helgolandicus
currently spreading north as waters
get warmer. The fifth cephalothoracic
limbs are shown separate at lower
left. The shape of the inner edge is the
distinguishing character between C.
helgolandicus and C. finmarchicus.
NOAA
JAMSTEC
North Pacific
CPR survey
SAHFOS
AusCPR
BCLME
SCAR SO CPR survey
Routes currently sampled by the CPR. SAHFOS runs most of the north Atlantic routes with help from NOAA and Canada. The North Pacific
routes are run from Nanaimo, Canada with help from Japan but are an offshoot of SAHFOS. The Australian and Southern Ocean surveys
are run from Australia. BCLME = Benguela Current Large Marine Ecosystem, JAMSTEC = Japanese element of the North Pacific route.
fsbi Newsletter Summer 2014 2
➤ fishing pressure on the cod
population.
The CPR survey is now at a point
where it needs to secure its future
with a more diverse medium to long
term funding stream. Professor
Nicholas Owens Director since
August 2012 has initiated a fund
raising campaign with the aim of
generating £5m over a five-year
period. This will secure funding
for the basic survey and allow
the organisation to employ more
scientists to research the unique
84-year time series of data. The
CPR data has already been used by
the IPCC in its latest deliberations,
and there is no doubt that in the
future, the CPR data will become
more valuable as the time series is
extended.
If readers know of any
organisation that might have an
interest in contributing to the
funding of SAHFOS, then please
contact either me or Professor
Owens ([email protected]).
Paul Hart
Trustee of SAHFOS and one time CPR
employee (1970 – 1973)
Launching a CPR off the stern of a
merchant vessel. This job is done by the
ship’s crew who volunteer to do the work
and who are trained by SAHFOS in the
details of the task
Koenraad Kortmulder summarises Piet Sevenster’s career
January 19th, 2014 one of the last
remaining of Niko Tinbergen’s
Dutch pupils passed away, Piet
Sevenster. Piet was an exceptionally
gifted teacher. Many hundreds of
students may remember how he
introduced them to stickleback
behaviour. Master’s students with a
stickleback subject he took out into
the polder, because “they had to see
sticklebacks in their natural habitat at
least once in their lives”. With lucky
elects he went out for a discussion
lunch almost weekly, some for years.
With Piet’s scientific shrewdness
and erudition these made a lasting
impression.
In 1949 he accompanied Tinbergen
to Oxford as his research assistant.
During that year Piet made the
acquaintance of famous and to become
famous biologists: Hardy, Garstang,
WMS Russell, Manning and others.
Tinbergen wished Piet to stay and study
kittiwakes in the field for a PhD, but
Piet preferred to return to Leiden, to
learn from Jan van Iersel and his new,
strictly quantitative methods.
3 fsbi Newsletter Summer 2014
It certainly was a privilege to be
educated by these two men. Jan’s
iron logic and unshakeable faith in
quantitative work combined with
Piet’s elegant experimenting and
feeling for the relationship between
lab and nature were a unique
combination. In 1975 Piet received
an honorary readership at Leiden
University, which was turned into a
professorship in
1980. From 1977 onwards he was
also extraordinary professor at
the Free University of Brussels to
teach ethology for psychology and
pedagogical students. He accepted
a guest professorship at Queens
College (University of New York) in
1968.
Piet’s high-quality published work
has had substantial impact on the
behavioural sciences. An anthology:
In his fine-grained analysis of
displacement fanning in the threespined stickleback, Piet discovered
the principle of disinhibition. At the
time this revolutionised thinking
about displacement activities in
general. Operant conditioning
experiments with sticklebacks met
with some fundamental constraints
caused by the animal’s natural
motivation-structure. These were of
considerable value to learning theory.
From an early date, Piet
pleaded optimal conditions for
lab animals held in stock, lest
results of experiments (unnaturally
impoverished by definition) would
lose relevance to the natural
situation. He was one of three
independent discoverers of the
principle of behavioural selection
(Russell & Russell, 1990). His studies
in behavioural genetics include
selection and crossing experiments
with an aberrant doublecreepingthrough trait and a thorough analysis
of the respective contributions of
heredity and environment on the
aggressive behaviour of sticklebacks,
conducted under his guidance in
Leiden and in Brussels.
Keith Nelson’s discovery of the
organising function of the creepingthrough cycle opened up a whole new
field of experiments for Piet and his
pupils.
The above should not suggest
that Piet was only interested in
sticklebacks. Surely, he was much
attached to this classic animal of
ethology, but his scope was much
wider. Learning experiments with
horses and dogs, field work on gulls
and terns and studies on skuas at
far-away islands together with Ab
Perdeck and Olaf Paris to mention a
few. His office used to be populated
with doves, chipmunks or gerbils.
Later, he gave much attention to the
cause of animal welfare, which he
managed to approach with scientific
precision as well as with his heart.
After retirement he continued
stickleback studies, turning to
circadian rhythms and sleep. Those
alive to-day honour him as a great
scientist, a stimulating teacher and
charming person.
Editorial
There is more than usual about
death in this issue. Sadly we
have to report the death of three
people who have made the
study of sticklebacks, mostly
Gasterosteus aculeatus, their life’s
work. Piet Sevenster was a Dutch
biologist who was a student of
Niko Tinbergen and died in January
2014 at the age of 90. Mike Bell of
Stony Brook University, USA, writes
that; ‘Prof. Sevenster was Niko
Tinbergen’s last surviving Dutch
graduate student and founder
of the International Conference
on Stickleback Behavior and
Evolution. Although he used
other species in his research, he
published numerous important
papers on stickleback ethology. He
organized the first two meetings
of the International Conference
in 1984 and 1994 and coedited
volumes of papers from these
meetings’.
Bob Wootton was a later
generation than either Tinbergen
or Sevenster but did much to
bring together information on
the behaviour and ecology of
sticklebacks in his influential
book, Biology of the Sticklebacks
published in 1976. Unlike
Sevenster, Wootton stuck to fish
and he is probably best known for
his book Ecology of Teleost Fishes.
This reached a wide audience and
was much used in teaching. By
modern day expectations, Bob
died young and a full appreciation
of his life is given elsewhere in this
edition by Carl Smith.
Mike Bell, who could be
called the record-keeper of the
stickleback world also told me
that Don Hagen, a Canadian
stickleback scientist had also
recently died. Mike writes: ‘Don
Hagen published his dissertation
as a long paper in 1967,
demonstrating that anadromous
and resident stickleback in
the Little Campbell River (on
Vancouver Island, BC, Canada)
are separate biological species.
He was attacked on a technical
point, and he and Don McPhail
published a rebuttal in 1970 that
demonstrated their understanding
of what we have come to realize
about stickleback evolutionary
patterns since. In 1972 and 1973,
Hagen published a series of
papers on habitat-phenotype
correlations, genetics, selection,
and contemporary evolution of
stickleback phenotypes, focused
mostly on lateral plates. This
work laid the foundation for
everything that has followed on
mechanisms for adaptive radiation
of threespine stickleback. Hagen
was a genius.
Unfortunately, soon after 1973,
Hagen was unceremoniously
(literally – a terse memo on a small
piece of paper in his mail box)
informed that his appointment
in the College of Fisheries at the
University of Washington would
not be renewed, and he had a
year to find a job. He landed in
a small college with a limited
research mission, the University
of New Brunswick in Fredricton,
Canada, where he published a few
interesting papers (including one
on the “white stickleback” with
Max Blouw) but soon lost interest
in research’. Mike Bell suggests
that Hagen lost his job in Seattle
because at that time there was
insufficient interest in evolutionary
questions and possibly also
because Hagen had a rather
daunting demeanor which meant
he hadn’t developed enough allies
in the department to support his
continued appointment.
These pioneers, who were
mostly interested in the
phenotypic aspects of behavior
and evolution, did the spadework
necessary for the likes of Dolph
Schluter (University of British
Columbia, Canada) and David
Kingsley (Stanford University,
California, USA) who have gone
on to turn the stickleback into
a model species for the study
of speciation and its genetic
basis. Without the large store
of information on behavior and
ecology, gathered over many
years and from widely distributed
habitats, the more experimentally
minded scientists, armed with
modern statistical and molecular
methods, would not have been
able to make sense of their results.
The now three yearly
International Conference on
Stickleback Behavior and
Evolution are a continuing legacy
of Sevenster and his Dutch
colleagues. The FSBI sponsored
the 6th such meeting in 2009,
held in Leicester, UK. From the
meeting held in Vancouver in 1999,
it was evident that a new era was
beginning in stickleback biology.
At the UBC meeting David Kingsley
and his then postdoc Katie Peichel,
presented the first account of the
stickleback genome. By 2009 the
genome had been sequenced
and now characters important in
the speciation process are being
unravelled at great speed. Exciting
times.
Paul Hart
Leicester, May 2014
Next deadline for copy: 1st August
2014
fsbi Newsletter Summer 2014 4
Robert John Wootton (1942-2014)
On the 3rd of March 2014 Robert
‘Bob’ Wootton passed away at
his home in Aberystwyth in West
Wales. He was 71. Bob was a
highly accomplished fish ecologist
and evolutionary biologist
and an authority on the threespined stickleback, a species he
successfully championed as a
model species for research.
Born and raised in Birmingham,
Bob took his first degree in
natural sciences at Christ’s
College, Cambridge (the same
Cambridge College as Charles
Darwin), followed by a PhD at the
University of British Columbia in
Vancouver. Bob’s postgraduate
research concerned methods
for quantifying male behaviour
in the three-spined stickleback,
the species with which he was to
become most associated. After
returning to the UK, Bob accepted
a post-doctoral fellowship in the
Department of Psychology at the
University of Durham, working on
the neurobiology of cognition in
pigeons. Despite this change in
study system, Bob confessed to
me that while at Durham he used
to take his sandwiches down to
the River Wear at lunchtime where
he could watch sticklebacks
nesting in a backwater. Indeed,
Bob subsequently published a
paper on three-spined stickleback
nest-raiding behaviour based on
these lunchtime observations.
He cut short his post-doctoral
research to take a lectureship
in the Department of Zoology at
the University College of Wales,
Aberystwyth. This department went
through numerous reorganisations
and renamings over his career,
but was essentially the same
institution he retired from as
Reader 40 years later.
Bob’s knowledge of threespined stickleback biology was
unsurpassed. Until very recently
he owned a copy, and had read,
every paper published on the
5 fsbi Newsletter Summer 2014
species. He was convinced of
the utility of this animal for
tackling key evolutionary and
ecological questions. And he
was subsequently proven right;
the three-spined stickleback has
emerged as the premier vertebrate
‘supermodel’ in evolutionary
and behavioural biology, its
adoption as such owing in part
to Bob’s work on the species,
and particularly his outstanding
synthesis of the natural history
of the stickleback fishes, The
Biology of the Sticklebacks,
published in 1976, and later A
Functional Biology of Sticklebacks
in 1984. To date these works have
received over 1,000 citations. It is
regrettable that one of the tasks
he had set himself for retirement
was producing an updated version
of The Biology of the Sticklebacks.
There are few biologists now
with the breadth and depth of
knowledge to tackle a work of this
scale.
While Bob’s name will always
be associated with the stickleback
fishes, his interests and major
accomplishments are more broadly
as a fish ecologist. His most cited
work is Ecology of Teleost Fishes,
the standard text on the subject
since its first publication in 1990.
Arguably Bob’s most significant
contribution to the field of fish
biology is through the series of
prominent books he wrote and
edited that have been widely
used in teaching and research.
Bob also published over 100
research papers and reviews and
is one of the most highly cited
fish biologists. Bob’s philosophy
was that to fully appreciate
fish ecology it is necessary to
understand growth, since it is body
size that plays the pivotal role in
all the fundamental ecological
processes, such as reproduction,
predation and mortality. Growth,
Bob believed, is the key to
understanding fish life-history
evolution. To understand growth
it is also necessary to understand
feeding, and Bob and several
of his postgraduate students
published a series of influential
papers on growth, body size and
bioenergetics in fish. Sadly, while
Bob was highly valued by his
colleagues at Aberystwyth, his
research received little external
support, and it was a source of
great frustration for him to see
modish but mediocre research
obtain generous financial
assistance. Despite this, Bob’s
contribution to research was
recognised when he was elected
as a Fellow of the Linnean Society
and awarded the Le Cren Medal by
the Fisheries Society of the British
Isles.
Bob Wootton receiving the LeCren Medal
in 2010. Bob was the first person to
receive this medal
Bob performed long-term
editorial roles for both the Journal
of Fish Biology and Ecology of
Freshwater Fishes. He was a
proficient and conscientious
editor and provided admirable
service to both journals for many
years. In 2012, the editorial
➤
➤ board of Ecology of Freshwater
Fishes recognised his contribution
by naming him Editorial Board
Member Emeritus. He was
extremely generous with his time,
and skilfully and selflessly read
and commented on manuscripts
for colleagues and students
throughout his career.
Three events in his life were
defining for Bob. The first was
the birth of his twins, Sean
and Siobhan. Bob’s family had
overwhelming importance for
him. He was devoted to Maureen,
his wife, and their twins. Latterly
he was thrilled to become a
grandfather to Alfie and Ella.
The second defining event was
a successful ascent of Mont
Blanc, the highest peak in the
Alps. Mountaineering was a
major passion of his, and he
was an accomplished climber.
Bob once encouraged me to take
up mountaineering. It was only
when he explained to me, in his
typically cool and understated
way, how on every major climb he
had undertaken, there had come a
point when he believed he would
not leave the mountain alive that
I decided, for the only time, to
disregard his advice. The third
life-defining moment for Bob was
receipt of the published version
of his first book, The Biology of
the Sticklebacks. He had written
the book to occupy the long hours
when his newly-born twins took
turns in keeping him awake at
night, but is was clearly a work of
which he was justifiably extremely
proud.
Bob’s other great legacy is
the cohorts of undergraduate
and postgraduate students
he taught. Bob had a deep
commitment to teaching and was
an outstandingly gifted lecturer. He
was instrumental in establishing
innovative degree courses at
Aberystwyth and undertook a
staggering amount of this teaching
himself. As a postgraduate
student I attended his course on
fish ecology. Remarkably, Bob
taught this course entirely without
props or audiovisual aids - no
PowerPoint slides, overheads,
handouts, not even a chalkboard.
Armed with nothing more than
his own profound understanding
of the subject, he simply stood
(and more often sat) at the front of
the lecture theatre and explained
the principles of the subject he
understood so well. His lectures
were enthralling and greatly
appreciated by his students.
Bob’s influence extended well
outside the UK. His stickleback
work had particular importance
for researchers in Canada and
the USA, where research on
these fishes has been best
Bob Wootton and his wife Maureen together with daughter and grand child
developed, and he held an adjunct
professorship at McGill University
in Canada. Bob also instituted
and maintained links with
Chinese scientists, long before
it became customary to do so.
One of Bob’s most accomplished
postgraduate students was Yibo
Cui, who established a major
research centre on fish ecology
and biotechnology at the Institute
of Hydrobiology in Wuhan. Bob
had a great fondness for China; he
visited regularly, spoke Mandarin
and received a series of Chinese
students and visitors to his lab,
many of whom now hold influential
positions in Chinese science.
Bob suffered progressively
declining health over the last 6
years of his life, though his illness
did not halt his academic work and
he published 22 papers during
that period. From 2009 until a few
weeks before his death, Bob and
I worked together on a new book
on fish reproduction, which Bob
saw successfully to completion.
Despite his illness, Bob devoted
himself to what would be his last
major piece of academic work, and
it is testimony to his extraordinary
tenacity, and intellectual and
physical endurance, that he was
able to do so. The book will be
another of his many legacies to the
field of fish biology.
On a personal level Bob was
quiet, self-effacing and courteous.
Yet in a calm and consistent way
he was courageous and resilient,
accepting and overcoming
enormous challenges in his career.
He resisted academic bullying and
placed stern demands on those in
positions of authority. At the same
time he was extremely kindly and
understanding in his treatment of
students and junior colleagues.
He attained an enviable reputation
among those he worked with for
honesty, intellectual rigour and
professionalism, and he will be
greatly missed by his colleagues
and family.
Carl Smith
St Andrews, Scotland
fsbi Newsletter Summer 2014 6
Travel Grant Reports
ADAM KEEN a
PhD student in
the Manchester
Institute of
Biotechnology,
reports on his
attendance
at the Society
for Integrative
and Comparative Biology annual
meeting held in Austin, Texas, USA,
where he presented his PhD work
to date. He also reports on a visit
to the University of North Texas
(UNT), where he undertook a study
into cardiac function of freshwater
turtles (Trachmys scripta) under the
supervision of Dr. Dane Crossley.
My work at UNT looked at heart
function in vivo, in a terminally
anaesthetized turtle, and then also
at cardiac compliance of an isolated
whole heart preparation. By using
these techniques I hoped to find the
differences between flow and pressure
in the warm and cold acclimated
hearts at rest and in response to a
volume load. I also hoped to find the
difference in the stretch capabilities
of the heart. Furthermore, I was able
to collect and prepare tissue samples
for a number of further studies to
be carried out back in Manchester.
I found the tutoring of Dr Crossley
incredibly valuable and I believe
that the experience has matured my
scientific capabilities and outlooks.
Equally, having the opportunity to
learn technically challenge skills and
techniques from an expert in the field
is one that I cherished.
Finally, no trip to Texas would
be complete without going to a
basketball game, sitting on the grassy
knoll, a trip to hooters, visiting a gun
shop, eating a 30oz steak, watching
the Superbowl and having the best
BBQ money can buy! There were long,
hard and challenging days in the
lab, but also lots of fun and plenty of
bourbon to go around!
It is with the upmost gratitude that
I thank FSBI for the very generous
travel award. I feel incredibly
privileged to have had to opportunity
for such an amazing trip, both for its
educational value and as it was such
a great time. As a result I feel inspired
to make the most of my PhD and
7 fsbi Newsletter Summer 2014
hope to continue and progress in my
scientific career.
BIKRAMJIT
GHOSH, PhD
Candidate at
the National
Centre for Marine
Conservation
& Resource
Sustainability
University of Tasmania, Australia was
invited to the Aquaculture Research
Institute at the University of Idaho
in Moscow, ID, USA by the Associate
Director, Dr. Kenneth Cain, to work
on fish immunological research
at his laboratory. He writes: My
role would be focused mainly on a
local disease, Flavobacteriosis or
bacterial coldwater disease (BCWD),
in farmed Rainbow trout. Thanks to
the generous support of the FSBI, I
was able to travel to Idaho in early
2013 with the intention of spending
six months there examining specific
aspects of oral immunoprophylaxis
against BCWD. My research aims for
the period were twofold – (1) to assess
the immunoprophylactic effect of a
putative probiotic species against
BCWD when administered via different
routes; (2) to assess the feasibility
of administering a live-attenuated
vaccine orally to protect rainbow
trout from BCWD infection. Both
projects presented potentially unique
opportunities for me, as current
aquatic animal health regulations in
Australia make these areas of research
difficult to access. The preliminary
results from my research were
encouraging enough that I decided
to extend my stay considerably to
accommodate the full extent of
both projects. Investigation of the
putative probiotic indicated that,
while it did not behave as typically
expected of a probiotic species, its
protective effects presented great
potential for development into an
alternative injectable vaccine against
BCWD. Results from study of the
live-attenuated vaccine showed that
oral administration of the vaccine
performed on par with injected
vaccination. Traditionally, oral
vaccination of fish has been found
significantly inferior in protective
ability to injected administration,
and in this context our results
were very encouraging, and will
provide considerable impetus to the
further development of this vaccine
towards commercialization. I hope
to present published results from
both these studies this year. As a
PhD candidate, these results will
contribute to broadening the scope
and applicability of my graduate
research. I also learnt a great deal
about research practices outside
the Australian paradigm, was able
to present my work for critique to
established scientists in my field, and
initiate professional relationships
that I am sure will contribute to my
future scientific career. The visit as a
whole has greatly enhanced my PhD
candidature experience, and I feel very
fortunate to have been afforded this
opportunity.
FIKRET ONDES,
a PhD student
from the School
of Ocean
Sciences,
Bangor
University,
attended
the Second
Symposium
on FisheryDependent Information at the
headquarters of the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations (FAO), Rome, Italy
3-6 March, 2014. My main aims in
attending the symposium were to
present part of my PhD research and
review of recent progress in electronic
monitoring systems in fisheries
science. As I intend to continue my
using fishery dependent data to
ensure the sustainability of fisheries
in Turkey. This approach has not yet
been taken up in Turkey. Therefore,
this conference can be considered
an important opportunity to contact
scientists and managers who are
interested in fishery-dependent data,
and who are planning both national
and international projects for the
future.
The 4-day symposium attracted
more than 150 people from
academia, management bodies, and
the fishing industry, contributing
presentations and posters on
➤
➤ fishery dependent data. Oral
and poster presentations were
extremely interesting. The theme of
the conference was mainly related
to fully documented fisheries,
electronic monitoring (EM) design
and the implications having the
information provided. I made two
poster presentations, together with
my supervisors Prof. Michel Kaiser
and Dr. Lee Murray, derived from
my PhD thesis on the ecology of
the brown crab in the Isle of Man to
inform sustainable management. In
the first poster, I presented results
based on fishery dependent and
fishery independent data, entitled
“The catch characteristics of brown
crab (Cancer pagurus) fishery in the
Isle of Man”. The aforementioned
data provide basic information about
stock structure and are used in order
to determine spatial and temporal
trends in crab catches. In addition,
the effects of environmental and
fishery-specific factors on catch per
unit effort (CPUE) were identified.
The second poster focussed on
the evaluation of the Isle of Man
recreational fishery using fisherydependent data. A recreational fishery
is often considered to have minimal
impact compared with commercial
fisheries. However, there remains a
need to consider recreational fisheries
together with commercial fisheries to
ensure a full understanding of total
exploitation rate. At this point, the
poster compared recreational catch
rates with commercial catch rates in
the Isle of Man. The conference was
an excellent experience providing
me with ideas and new directions for
both my thesis studies and potential
projects in the future. I would like
to thank the FSBI committee that
awarded me the travel grant to attend
this conference.
Notice of FSBI Annual
General Meeting
Other meetings
Notices
Medal awards for 2014
At its April Council meeting the
following medal awards were
agreed.
Beverton Medal: Dr Alexander
P Scott, ex-Cefas and one time
Secretary to the Society
FSBI Medal: Dr Darren P Croft,
University of Exeter
LeCren Medal: Dr R Colin A
Bannister, ex-Cefas
The Annual General Meeting of the
Society will take place at 1200 on
Wednesday 9th July 2014 in Hull
during the FSBI Annual Summer
Symposium.
Nominations for Council
membership should be sent to
the Society’s Secretary, Dr John
Pinnegar. Contact information is
available on the Society’s web
pages.
20-24 October 2014
5th International Otolith Symposium
2014 (IOS2014)
Mallorca, Spain
website: http://www.ices.dk/newsand-events/symposia/otolith/
Pages/default.aspx
9-14 November 2014
9th International Flatfish Symposium
Seattle, Washington, USA
website: http://www.
flatfishsymposium.com/
Information Desk
For all membership enquires (except
subscription payments), including grant
application submissions, please contact the
FSBI office at:
FSBI, c/o Charity & Social Enterprise
Department, Brabners, Horton House,
Exchange Flags, Liverpool L2 3YL, UK
Contact: Shirley Robinson
Phone: +44 (0) 151 600 3362
In the UK and Europe subscription enquiries
should be addressed to:
[email protected] Charities and Social
Enterprise Department, Brabners, Chaffe Street,
Horton House, Exchange Flags, Liverpool L2 3YL
Tel: 0151 600 3000 (ext. 3362)
Fax: 0151 227 3185
See http://www.fsbi.org.uk/membership/
joining-the-fsbi/ for further information.
Email Enquiries: [email protected]
Secretary: Dr John Pinnegar
Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science, Lowestoft Laboratory,
Pakefield Road, Lowestoft, Suffolk, NR33 OHT
Tel. +44 (0)1502 524229 Fax. +44 (0)1502 513865 Mob. +44 (0)7747 606287
E-mail: [email protected]
www.fsbi.org.uk
fsbi Newsletter Summer 2014 8