Combesgate

It's Underwater Warfare Out There.....

Beadlet anemones, Actinia equina, so named for their necklace of neon blue ‘beads’ use these to fight and Dr Sarah Lane, a behavioural ecologist with an interest in fighting behaviours, has been studying them – first carefully removing them from the rocks and then putting them in tanks and filming fights between anemones carefully matched in size and put in the same tank so they are touching - to find the answers to six questions: What are the costs of fighting?...Do relatives fight?...Is aggression inherited?...How do injuries affect individuals?...Why do individuals decide to give up?...W

Career-Ending Crash of the HMS Montague.....

The fate of HMS Montague was not the one intended when she was built…owing to navigational confusion during a communications exercise and thick fog she became grounded on the rocks surrounding Lundy and became - instead of a functioning battleship with the  latest radio technology - a local tourist attraction…postcards were made, tourists came by the boatload, she was dressed for royal birthdays and weddings and 21 gun salutes fired…but eventually despite an ongoing salvage operation, first by the Admiralty and then by a private firm she broke up on the rocks and became another feature of L

Brilliant Coast Shines Out......

The ecology of bryozoans is not an obvious immediate attention-grabber, but Mark Ward of Somerset Wildlife Trust devoted five years of his life to it.

Mark is now in the world of community outreach, based on the Somerset coast and working for the local Wildlife Trust, but made bryozoans the subject of his PhD thesis. He then acquired a PGCE and  flirted with teaching before making a career with the Field Studies Council and Wildlife Trusts.

Come out of your shells !

Maybe this should have been titled: What we could find on the Shore if we were as amazing at finding creatures as Jan…especially highly camouflaged creatures that look exactly like the seaweed they are on and are only up to a centimetre long: stalked jellyfish and nudibranchs…Jan has even managed to find a nudibranch that is currently on a world tour of marine biologists to be identified, and has no official name…yet…but watch this space, or better still follow its progress on the Coastwise FaceBook page…Jan also showed us incredibly clear and enviably steady videos including one of a hermi

Pages

Subscribe to Coastwise North Devon RSS

Copyright Coastwise