7 minute read

Or, you can listen to the full conversation on The Wild Cornwall Podcast.

What do you do for Cornwall Wildlife Trust?

I’m a marine conservation officer and do a whole range of different things. I'm really lucky in having a really varied job. I work on lots of different projects. I'm out and about a lot with volunteers, developing their skills so they can help us record marine wildlife on the shore. I do lots of rockpooling, diving and snorkelling… and all those things are my passion!

I absolutely love being out in the marine environment, surrounded by nature, and hopefully that enthusiasm rubs off! It can get people started on an amazing journey. I've got some incredible volunteers… once they get interested and start learning, they get hooked. I get a kick out of that.

I also work on our Cornwall Good Seafood Guide project. Check it out: it gives you up to date information on seafood sustainability in Cornwall...

What's the best part of your job?

Definitely diving expeditions where we go out and explore uncharted territory. I've always loved the feeling of exploring… you never know what you’re going to find… it really gives me a buzz.

What did you want to do when you were five years old?

This! I'm very lucky that from an early age I had a good idea of what I wanted to get out of life. I've been obsessed with wildlife since I was a boy. I think my first word was “fish”! My parents encouraged it. I was actually a member of the junior Branch of The Wildlife Trust. I remember going on bird watching and pond dipping trips… and I had my own little wildlife club: my mates and I made a club house and we all had membership cards! I had a massive skull collection in my bedroom, with a whole range of different species, and I had an aquarium which my dad helped me build. We used to go down to Swanpool Beach in Falmouth and collect specimens to put in the aquarium and study them and put them back in the sea after a few weeks…

Tell us about National Marine Week...

National Marine Week has been going for about 20 years. It’s a really big thing for us in Cornwall. We're really lucky to have this brilliant network of local marine groups in Cornwall called the Your Shore Network. Over the last few years, we've been working together, organizing events all over Cornwall to allow people to come along and experience Cornish marine wildlife. We run lots of different types of events: snorkelling, rock pooling, beach cleans, clifftop watches, looking for dolphins, seals, etc. There’s something for everybody!

Come along and get involved!

Let's talk about the sea. What problems are we facing in 2022?

There are multiple problems… but I suppose the human race is probably the biggest problem because we’ve been excellent at exploiting wildlife,  on land, and particularly in the sea.

There’s been a long history of overexploitation: it’s a massive problem globally. We've seen overfishing before in our waters. On top of that, we've currently got the climate emergency, which is a really worrying for marine biologists as much as for terrestrial biologists. The ocean is constantly changing, and species come and go, but at the moment, we're seeing warm water species really, really doing well in our waters, at the expense of cold-water species. It might mean that there's opportunities for fishermen in the short term, but in the long term… it's a big concern.

So why is it different to conservation work on land?

On land the Trust is fortunate  in that it has been able to actually go out and buy bits of land and look after them. I'm quite jealous of my terrestrial counterparts who have these nature reserves that they can lavish that attention on! It's a lot harder in our marine team because we don't have any sizable marine nature reserves. We do have a couple, which is great. We've got Looe Island, where we have the shore there, and various, a small amount of marine habitat. And we've got the Fal Ruan nature reserve… So we have got some marine nature reserves and we do great work in those places. But it’s a tiny area.

Actually, for real marine conservation, we need to manage larger areas… and these areas need to be joined up. Within those areas, we need to make sure that we're really allowing wildlife to recover. Sadly, we haven't ever really managed that in the UK's coastal waters. In fact, we've got no idea what our seas would look like if we actually properly managed them and protected them! As for years, humans have been constantly extracting wildlife from our seas.

There are examples all around the world of places where they do restrict fishing, and other activities, and you find that wildlife just thrives and rebounds incredibly rapidly. And it actually adds to the productivity of the ocean, so much so that you find that in other countries fishers are really in support of these protected areas, and they appreciate their value, because the ecosystem has been able to recover and fishing has improved across a wide area around the reserves.

We’ve seen improvements, though. Since I joined Cornwall Wildlife Trust in 2012,  the government has now established a network of Marine Conservation Zones (MCZ’s), which we didn't have before. We’re grateful for that! However, the majority of these haven't really changed what's happening in the sea.

Why not?

Well, they protect certain habitats and species only. They’re often drawn around areas where there's a rare species, but that species is there because there isn't any threat to that species!  They haven’t been set up to protect the entire ecosystem and they haven’t been set up to benefit commercial fish stocks.

So what needs to happen to change this?

You have to work with stakeholders, obviously working with industries like fishing, but at the same time, you have to follow scientific advice and listen to it. Other countries, I think, have perhaps got it a bit better than us. For example, in Australia, the government created a lot of large reserves, based on sound scientific advice and then had conversations and debate after they decided where these areas should be. And I think that approach seemed to be more effective, although they are fortunate in Australia having a smaller population of people and a much bigger coast.

So it is challenging. Going forwards we've got a big pressure on space in our seas. There are multiple industries involved. It isn't just the fishing industry. We're going to see renewable energy taking up space – and we need renewable energy to tackle climate change. So there's going to be increased pressure on the seabed. What we'd like to see is it being done really sensibly, so not only allows these things to happen, but also strengthening conservation objectives.

People use the word ‘rewilding’ a lot about land. Is this relevant to the sea?

There are moves towards this whole idea of marine rewilding, particularly looking at carbon storage: the ocean is amazing at storing carbon! Sea ecosystems are highly productive: plankton and seaweeds grow far more quickly than land plants, and they suck down carbon from the atmosphere. So they're vital in our battle against climate change.

There's been a lot of talk about habitats like seagrass beds and how we can ensure they survive and expand. There are lots of exciting projects nationally - and we're really excited that in Cornwall we are starting an exciting new project funded by Seasalt Cornwall, which we're going to be working on at our Fal Ruan nature reserve. There you have a dwarf seagrass bed - quite a small kind, perhaps a bit less impressive looking than the big seagrass - but they trap carbon really effectively, up to twice as well as our common seagrass.

We're going to be doing a really exciting study of the seagrass beds on this nature reserve, looking at how they work, looking at the water parameters, etc. And then we're going to be doing some trials to try to reseed it and expand the size of that seagrass bed. If those go well, what we'd love to do is then to take that technology and use it in other estuaries in Cornwall, where seagrass beds have been lost. In the 1930s, we lost 90% of all our intertidal seagrass. So there is a big potential there for re-establishing that habitat to lock down a lot of carbon. It's a big project – and this is a really early stage. So, watch this space…

Learn more about seagrass in Cornwall

What else is going on in the team you're working in?

Well, our marine team are working constantly behind the scenes to influence and improve things for the seas. There's so much I could talk about, there's not time to mention everything...

Raising public awareness is a massive thing. We're trying to educate people. We're also gathering data which is going to be really useful: our citizen science work is really helpful because it's allowing us to monitor change and document it more effectively.

And then there’s more long term projects, such as our Marine Strandings Network, where we record stranded marine animals to work out what's going on and to look at trends.

It's incredibly sad. It takes a really dedicated type of volunteer to do it, because it does get you down. Whenever a wild animal gets washed up on shore, dead or alive, we've got our 24-hour hotline staffed by volunteers the public can ring. If it is alive, colleagues at British Divers Marine Life Rescue will be called into to try and rescue it. If it's dead, our strandings volunteers will come down and they'll record that stranding.

Since the project was started over 20 years ago, we've got now a really good database. Many of the animals that are coming in, if they're fresh enough, get taken away for a full post-mortem carried out by a vetinary pathologist. We've built up a really good picture of what is threatening marine mammals around our coasts… a whole host of different threats. Pollution is one, but we're seeing that probably the greatest impact is down to entanglement in fishing gear… and getting that information has been really useful. It's allowed us to raise the issue and we've been doing lots of research looking at methods to reduce bycatch in gill nets, including our brilliant research on pingers. These are acoustic devices which alert dolphins that there's a net in the water – and that technology has now been used all around the world.

Another great example was back in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, there was a lot of dolphins coming in with broken jaws. And they were able to prove that this was down to a type of fishing called pelagic trawling which was targeting bass. So that fishery actually ended up being stopped partly as a result of the work of our strandings volunteers. So it's really vital.

At times I really feel for volunteers, because it's emotionally hard seeing these dead animals… but we've got to keep going because if someone's not doing it, those deaths have all been wasted. So we're very, very grateful to those volunteers and proud of all they do.

If someone wants to do something to help marine conservation, what would you suggest?

People who live in Cornwall are likely to be quite near their local marine conservation group. A lot of these groups are linked to the Wildlife Trust. So have a look on our website at the Your Shore Network of marine groups, and get in touch with the one that's closest to you.