Jellyfish monitoring suggested
The project “JELLYFISH MONITORING IN WESTERN SCOTTISH WATERS IN RELATION TO AQUACULTURE ACTIVITIES –ESTABLISHMENT AND TESTING OF PROTOCOLS FOR A MONITORING NETWORK”, by Clive Fox, Keith Davidson and Christine Beveridge from the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS), started in January 2012 and ran until June 2014.
The project was set up to investigate whether a more comprehensive monitoring system could be established across the west coast. Working with industry partners, the project has established a baseline of the species occurring from the Clyde to the north of Skye over a period of two years. The project also produced an internet-based reporting system, which could provide the industry with a platform for collating data and associated incident records across multiple sites.
It would be much more likely that patterns for jellyfish bloom occurrence and consequences would emerge if data across the west of Scotland could be analysed as a whole - as opposed to each company or site having access only to its own records.
The project also provided training to farm staff in collection of plankton samples and in identifying jellyfish and, in addition, funded preparation of a sampling manual that can be used to guide monitoring.
However, one significant issue which has emerged from the workshops is that farm staff felt they would be unlikely to find the time to analyse plankton samples for medusa themselves. This area requires further discussion with the industry as the analysis of samples by SAMS was only funded for the duration of this project, a new report on the project stated.
