Sea watchers celebrate at Cornwall College Newquay
On Saturday 16th November, over 50 Cornwall Wildlife Trust marine volunteers met at Cornwall College, Newquay for an inspirational day of talks to celebrate the marine conservation work happening around the county at its annual Seaquest Southwest Conference.
From basking sharks to underwater corals, Cornwall is home to a huge variety of marine life, all of which is monitored via the Trust’s LivingSeas projects. One such LivingSeas project is the Seaquest Southwest, which has been running for over 10 years in the county and aims to record public sightings of marine life in Cornwall and use that information to better conserve the animals that live there. In addition to that, Seaquest Southwest also supports hundreds of keen volunteers who go out and do marine surveys of our sea life around our coastline looking for animals such as porpoise, whales and our rare, residential bottlenose dolphins.
Abby Crosby, Marine Conservation Officer at Cornwall Wildlife Trust and organiser of the conference says,
‘The Seaquest Southwest conference is an annual event and a chance to pull together these fantastic volunteers and talk about all the brilliant marine recording going on around the county thanks to their hard work’.
Volunteers listened to talks about the dive surveys and rocky shore recording, plus saw the results of their 2013 marine survey sightings which showed 2013 to be a busy year at sea with hundreds of common dolphins spotted offshore in large pods and a record breaking numbers of sunfish visiting in the summer months.
‘Cornwall Wildlife Trust was able to organise the conference thanks to the support from Cornwall College Newquay, who provided a perfect venue for the event and even bought us biscuits for the break times! Thanks to them, our volunteers enjoyed an interesting and inspirational day.’
Rebecca Allen, programme manager for the Marine Conservation course at Cornwall College, Newquay says,
‘It’s a great pleasure for the college to support the wildlife trust by hosting an event like this and it also creates a wonderful opportunity for our students to get more involved in their work’.
Anybody and everybody are welcome to get involved in Seaquest Southwest. For more information please email Seaquest@cornwallwildlifetrust.org.uk or check out the Trust’s Living Seas work on the website www.cornwallwildlifetrust.org.uk/livingseas .
