Marine conservation

[Amadis]

I'm planning an 18 month trip to New Zealand accross the Atlantic and Pacific oceans on which I plan to undertake research on (probably) large predatory fish and the open-ocean ecosystem.

Are there any others out there who have done or are planning such a trip?

I would be interested to know if there are any long-distance cruisers who are interested in helping to conserve the environment they sail on and who may get involved in surveys of dolphins, turtles, rubbish etc and what organisations they have maybe got involved with.
Also I would be very grateful if those of you interested in marine life could let me know of the fish/mammal species you have encountered/fished most often in various parts of the world, in particular between the Canaries and Caribbean, the Lesser Antiles and the southern Pacific as I am trying to determine which species are often viewed from yachts and therefore would be most feasable to research/survey.
Cheers!


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[Evadne]

There are quite a few science institutes from this country that do biological research: The Natural History Museum, various institutes associated with the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and some Universities, notably Southampton, Plymouth, Liverpool, Cambridge, Oxford, Bangor; and that's without all the ones I've forgotten. The NERC website http:// www.nerc.ac.uk is a good place to start, it also has links to other organisations outside the UK and contacts for the institutes. Most have an external affairs dept. or similar. For fish species and their distribution you could try the museum or Southampton, although there are probably a number of textbooks that will tell you about the more well-known species.

I presume you are talking about yacht-borne visual observations of surface animals, or were you planning to take samples, carry out netting or other forms of sampling? The mega- and macro-fauna are what most people think of here (whales, sharks, turtles and fish) but it is the smaller animals that are often more interesting scientifically, as well as being more numerous and easier to sample. The trouble with taking samples is they have to be preserved and/or recorded. For this you'd need a microscope, camera, reference books, formalin, kilner jars or whatever. Not to mention a net.

The part of the institute I work at specialises in deeper work (i.e. down to the sea-bed) and I'm not a biologist anyway, but I would have thought that with a little perseverence you should find someone interested in the data you could collect. Good luck.


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[vyv_cox]

I fully support the message underlying your post. The great thing about scientific research is that there is so much to choose from and there are endless new topics. There must be hundreds of big-budget organisations looking at/counting/tagging and otherwise interfering with whales, turtles and other popular species, whereas to do the same for a plankton species or some other lesser-known organism might well be original and significant.

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[Evadne]

Yes, the marine ecosystem is one big food chain, where every animal goes around eating smaller animals until it meets a larger animal, and it is what happens to the little animals that affects the big ones - for instance el nino's affect on micro-organisms will propogate all the way up to whales and seabirds, but unless you study the whole food chain, however tedious that might be at times, you won't see what is actually happening. I still find it amazing that every time a biology research cruise goes out, even to the relatively well studied north atlantic, they will discover at least one animal that is new to science.

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