Marine

  • Stonehaven Sampling 27th June 2011

    27th June 2011 by

    The seascape was monochromatically grey today. The only relief from the shades of grey were the distant green fields on the land and the occasional pink patches in the sea caused by dense aggregations of jellyfish.

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  • Jellyfish

    16th June 2011 by

    Occasional jellyfish were spotted during sampling this week reminding us that they will be getting more and more abundant as the water warms over the summer (see photo of lots of jellyfish in the sea near Stonehaven last year). Some reports suggest a global increase in the abundance of jellyfish. The EU funded project EcoJel...

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  • ICES/NAFO Decadal Symposium Presentations

    20th May 2011 by

    In a previous post, we mentioned that several talks and posters were going to be presented at the ICES/NAFO Deacadal Symposium held in May. The overall purpose of the symposium was to improve the understanding of hydro-biological variability between 2000 and 2009 in the North Atlantic. Several presentations and posters were provided by Marine Scotland...

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  • Pause in blog updates

    23rd March 2011 by

    Due to the Scottish Parliament elections on May 5 this account won’t be updated except to communicate essential government business.

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  • The Big Bang

    18th March 2011 by

    Possibly not ‘The’ Big Bang, but that is what the event was called! Marine Scotland Science’s John Dunn recently went to London to the Excel centre in London’s Docklands as mentor for the lab’s Nuffield student of last year (Katie Forbes) at The Big Bang: UK Young Scientists and Engineers Fair (UK’s biggest single celebration of science...

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  • Not Just Inshore…

    11th March 2011 by

    As well as providing data on the inshore environment, the ecosystem monitoring programme also collects data in the offshore environment. A poster, entitled ‘Variability of physical and biological properties in the Faroe Shetland Channel between 2000-2009: results from a long-term monitoring programme and model data’ will be presented at the Decadal Symposium in Santander, Spain...

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  • ICES/NAFO Decadal Symposium Update…

    1st March 2011 by

    Five Marine Scotland Science abstracts, using data gathered at the east and west coast ecosystem monitoring stations, have been accepted for the ICES/NAFO Decadal Symposium, May 2011. Below are the accepted titles and the associated author lists. Spain here we come! (abstracts listed in no particular order) 1) Emerging patterns from time series of plankton sampling off the...

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  • Pseudocalanus

    23rd February 2011 by

    Pseudocalanus was the most abundant copepod in the plankton sample collected at Stonehaven 8th February 2011. Although I dare say there is nothing common about this particular individual once you appreciate the rainbow corona at its anterior (front) end -likely an artefact of the photography 🙂

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  • Kinetically Stormy, Biologically Calm

    21st February 2011 by

    A frothy Stonehaven shoreline (Photo: J. Dunn 21/02/11) On the surface the sea may look stormy, but biologically speaking, this is the period of calm before the storm! At this time of the year, there is very little phytoplankton or zooplankton in the water. Just around the temporal corner, the primary and secondary productivity of the...

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  • The Constant Sampler

    3rd February 2011 by

    The monitoring station at Stonehaven is over 13 years old and the one in Loch Ewe is 9 years old. With a view to collecting decades more data, succession planning is underway. Staff are being trained up, paperwork is going electronic, new shared folders have been established and group email accounts are being set up....

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