Southsea Marina Angling Club were delighted to host a talk from the International Seakeepers Society and Dr Christina Hunt at our monthly meeting at Southsea Marina in September.
Gill Rodrigues, Director of International Partnerships introduced Seakeepers which is a non-profit organisation promoting and enabling oceanographic research and education through the yachting and boating community. Seakeepers connect boat owners with researchers so that research projects can be undertaken without the major expense of boat charter, and boat owners can have an active part in supporting marine research and conservation. In addition, Seakeepers have a fleet of yachts which are used as research and education platforms.
Seakeepers are based mainly in the USA, but have UK and Asia-Pacific teams locally. They have an interesting form of funding: when super-yacht owners decide to replace their vessel they gift it to Seakeepers, which in some countries is a tax-deductible transaction. Seakeepers maintain the vessel in their fleet for three years and then sell it on. Unfortunately for SMAC members, supporting this presents us with a bit of a challenge because in the UK the tax concessions are not so generous, nor do any of us have a super yacht to give away.
Even if you don’t have a superyacht to gift or loan for scientist-led expeditions, anyone can be involved in other parts of the Discovery Yacht Program. These include Citizen Science Initiatives such as the one below; Educational Outreach and Community Engagement.
Gill then introduced Dr. Christina Hunt who is leading the Competitive Angling as a Scientific Tool (CAST) project for the University of Portsmouth. Dr. Hunt explained that the project is to map seabed habitats of five species groups in the eastern Solent area: Bass, Bream, Skates & Rays, Tope and Smoothhound. It is no coincidence that these are the species in the Sea Angling Classic competition because the catch size and location data for all the SAC competitions will be used to analyse the habitats and better understand the connection between the underwater topography and species movements.
Dr. Hunt is looking for volunteers to map the seabed in a number of specific locations using Lowrance or Simrad sonar. This hardware restriction is because the data analytics software is based on data formats from these manufacturers. For more details of the project and to get involved please see here
There is another project under way at the University of Portsmouth which is to develop an AI model to calculate fish length from a photographic image. To help the robot “learn”, it needs to look at a lot of fish photographs with a length ruler so if anyone has any such photographs from past catches please forward them to Dr. Christina Hunt.
SMAC would like to thank Gill Rodrigues and Megan Hickling from Seakeepers and Dr. Christina Hunt from the University of Portsmouth for a very interesting talk. We hope to keep in touch with both Seakeepers and the University of Portsmouth researchers so that we can help in these and future projects. Marine conservation needs to be based on knowledge, and sea anglers have a great interest in supporting both the research processes and conservation outcomes.
Useful links:
https://www.seakeepers.org/program-opportunities/competitive-angling
SMAC September 2024 see the full Monthly Meeting Report here.
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