Following a very successful large whale disentanglement workshop in Ullapool in late October, a group of Scottish Entanglement Alliance (SEA) project partners completed a two-day drone operator training course. This training was delivered by Brian Taggart and Matt Pickett of the US-based Oceans Unmanned, a non-profit organisation founded to harness the power of technology to […]

In the first workshop of its kind in Europe, creel fishermen and women from around Scotland gathered in the Highlands to tackle the problem of marine animal entanglement. Organised by the Scottish Entanglement Alliance (SEA) and funded by the University Innovation Fund through Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC), 20 creel fishermen and women from the Clyde […]

So far this month SEA project partners have already responded to three entanglement cases – one with a happy ending involving a humpback whale that was successfully freed from creel gear by SEA partners British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR) with assistance from the local fishing community (see previous post). However the other two were […]

A specially trained group of volunteers from British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR, a SEA project partner) were mobilised to assist a humpback whale entangled in fishing gear in Orkney on Monday 2nd October. The report was received from a local fisherman who discovered the animal anchored in his fishing ropes and did absolutely the […]

A brilliant article about the work of our colleagues in Canada, working to save the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale. There is a lot we can learn from other nations also working to prevent marine animal entanglements: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-48998569 Entanglement in fishing lines and nets is a growing concern globally and is considered by many […]

We’ve been a bit quiet on here for the last few weeks but that’s not because SEA haven’t been up to much – quite the opposite in fact! Our project co-ordinator has now completed her interviews with Scottish inshore creel fishermen and based on feedback from these, plans are now underway to host a disentanglement […]

It’s been a busy few weeks travelling coast to coast from the industrial east to the wild west, but luckily the weather was (mostly) on my side. Also lucky was a bit of spare time between meetings, markets, interviews and office work to appreciate our coast and all it has to offer including stunning scenery […]

On Thursday 30th May the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme (SMASS) team travelled north to perform a necropsy on yet another entangled whale, which was first spotted by a local fisherman floating at sea earlier in the week. This was a humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae), which stranded on Scrabster beach, Caithness.     The young humpback […]

In recent weeks the Scottish Entanglement Alliance (SEA) has documented three fatal whale entanglements around the coast of Scotland. 23rd April 2019 The first of these was a juvenile male humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) that washed ashore at Tyninghame near Dunbar. This animal had first been reported entangled two months earlier by a concerned fisherman, […]

Last week the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme (SMASS, www.strandings.org), a partner in the Scottish Entanglement Alliance (SEA), received a call about another whale entanglement – this time a minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) caught in ropes off the north-west coast of Scotland. The young minke whale spotted at sea, entangled around the head and mouth. […]