Common Skate - possible start of a recovery

[Ian Burrett]

After having learned earlier this year of two new areas where common skate have started to show again in Scotland; I was pleased to hear today that a few have started to show in the Bristol channel

 

Dr David Sims, Deputy Director (Research), and Senior Research Fellow of the Marine Biological Association of the UK, writes in a letter to SOS

We are planning to do some electronic tagging of common skate next summer in Loch Sunart. The common skate tagging forms part of a wider tagging programme we are conducting on skates and rays that is principally focussed in the western English Channel and Bristol Channel. We have recently found common skate in deeper parts of the Bristol Channel which raises the question of connectedness with the Scottish concentration around Mull. The behavioural work is complemented by studies already underway here in our ecology group on assessing population structure of skates and rays with molecular genetic techniques.

 

Long may the smallest of recoveries continue

__________________

Edited November 12, 2007 by Ian Burrett