The ECSA Coastal Taxonomy Course, held at Dale Fort Field Studies Centre, Pembrokeshire, August 15th - 19th. Led by John Archer-Thomson and Mark Burton.

Nine participants arrived for this course to be welcomed by Julian Cremona, the Centre Director who then handed us over to the Deputy Director, John Archer-Thomson, who in turn introduced us to his assistant Mark Burton. John and Mark were to be our guides and mentors over the next three days. The locale is beautiful, and the Centre well-equipped.

Throughout the course we were treated to numerous slide shows, notable not only for their scientific content, but also for their aesthetic qualities.

In the evening Dale Roston, an expert on the important group - the polychaete worms - discussed soft sediments, and showed a slides of species from this habitat. She had brought some fixed samples, and after her talk we examined these in the well-equipped laboratory of the Centre, mostly using low-powered stereo microscopes.

Left: John, watched by Dale (centre), fishes out some polychaetes.

Both John and Mark are qualified seamen and on Wednesday morning we were taken out in the 47 foot Watson class lifeboat, the Lord Hurcom, for a tour of some of the sites we were to study, which included a typical sheltered rocky shore, an exposed rocky shore and a salt marsh.

Sheltered Rocky Shores.

After an introductory talk and slide show we walked round to the Sheltered Rocky Shore, just beyond Dale proper, and equipped with dichotomous keys, studied the zonation of the flora and fauna, mostly algae (seaweeds) and molluscs. In the evening we spent an instructive hour or so identifying some of the red (Rhodophyte) algae, with dichotomous keys, helped by Mark.

Exposed Rocky Shores

On Thursday we visited Watwick Bay to study the zonation on an exposed rocky shore. Our tutors laid down tapes from the top of the cliff to the sea below, a height of approximately 10 metres. We were to work in threes, doing a continuous belt transect, putting 1 metre square quadrats in succession from the base up to the top, and recording all flora and fauna on the way. This was a fairly demanding excercise for your reporter since the surface was exremely rough and much of the Old Red Sandstone had been weathered into jagged edges, often in a near vertical orientation. Virtually all the quadrats contained one or more small rockpools, and it was interesting to see how the micro-climate these provided afforded shelter to the red alga Corallina, and the Snakelock anemone, Anemonia viridis, which would not otherwise have been able to survive into the Upper Shore Zone.

Left: Mark (foreground) and John pose half-way up the Exposed Rocky Shore site. Right: This shows the precarious nature of the footing at this site! Below: Your reporter is on the right.

The shot above clearly shows the 'pockmarked' nature of most of the rocks at the site. This enabled small rockpools to form and provide a sheltered microhabitat where organisms such as anemones and topshells could survive much further up the shore than normal. The vertical tapes for the continuous belt transect can be seen.

Fortunately the Salt Marsh provided an easier terrain for an overweight OAP. Less fortunately the weather became seriously rainy for the first time during the course. This time we were to use the point quadrat along an interrupted belt transect:

A wet day in South Pembrokeshire, which somehow seemed appropriate for investigating the structure of a salt marsh.

The bar through which the 'points' can be inserted is just visible.

Later we made a high speed (it felt like a 100mph, but I'm told it was about 20kts!) trip to a sheltered bay where we made a 10 minute low speed plankton drag net collection. Examined in the lab it proved remarkably rich, with lots of the type calanoid copepod Calanus sp. I also logged a Spionid polychaete, the dinoflagellate Ceratium, various Tintinnids, the Chrysophyte Halosphaera, and the diatoms Melosira, Rhizoselenia and Bacillaria paradoxa.

Two photomicrographs of some plankton: Right - head of a lobster (??) larva. Far right: A polychaete, one of the most common of the soft sediment fauna, although this one was present in the plankton.

Finally we spent some time discussing data analysis, including diversity indices such as Simpsons, and comparing our results with the data obtained by John and Mark on earlier sampling programs.

All in all this was an excellent course! Partly because the group as a whole 'gelled', and partly because both John and Mark possessed the unbeatable combination of expertise, enthusiasm and communication skills. Thanks to all, including Sian Pullen who organised it.

For the participants click here to download a group photo (~100 kb)