Octopus boom along England's southwest coast down to 'perfect storm'
Octopuses, sharks and tuna that are booming in the sea around the UK could be part of a fundamental shift in the marine environment, a leading scientist has told Sky News.
Dr Simon Thomas, from the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth, said a perfect storm of factors, including climate change and overfishing, is leading to a rapid change in the species being found around the coast.
"Since 2016, you've seen a lot of our traditional fish, like cod, ling and pollock decreasing in numbers and pushing northwards," he said.
"Then we've seen other fish, especially things like bluefin tuna and blue sharks, being found in huge numbers in the water here.
"It's almost like you've seen a complete shift in the regime of the ocean."
Fishermen on the south coast of Devon and Cornwall are currently catching huge numbers of a large octopus species that is normally rare in the UK.
"I've never seen anything like it in my lifetime," said Dr Thomas.
"I've spent 40 years at sea and probably seen three or four of the big octopus over the years. Now they are seen regularly and (crab fishermen) are reporting their pots have been decimated."
The octopuses are raiding crab and lobster pots for an easy meal.
But there are so many of them, and they are so hungry, that fishermen say they are eating not only the bait and crustaceans, but also, at times, each other.
Sam Jago, skipper of the Bosloe, returned to Plymouth after a day's fishing with 11 crates of octopuses - a 400kg bonanza that could fetch almost £3,000 at market rates.
But he had just over one tub of crabs and lobsters - when normally he'd have more than a dozen.
"They crack the shell and suck everything out of it," he said.
"It's a quick buck at the moment, but who knows how long it's going to last for.
"They will stay here until they've eaten everything.
"But if the octopus go, the crab isn't going to just appear out of thin air.
"We won't have a great deal to catch."
The Marine Biological Association is studying factors that could underpin the surge in octopus numbers.
The sea around the UK is around 2C warmer than normal. But in the southwest of England the temperature is 3C or even 4C above average for the time of year.
Dr Thomas said warmer waters increase survival of young octopus fry over winter, and a change to ocean currents could bring them more food.
'The ocean is changing'
Overfishing of species that would normally eat young octopuses may also mean more are surviving to adulthood.
"There is no doubt that the ocean is changing," he said.
"Fishermen are like the canaries in the coal mine, the first to see things changing out at sea."
Scientists say protecting key parts of the ocean as marine nature reserves would serve as a buffer against pressures from human activity elsewhere.
So far, 50 nations plus the EU have ratified the United Nations High Seas Treaty that commits countries to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030.
Another nine need to ratify it for it to become operational.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
Patients trial blood test for detecting early-stage cancers
Hundreds of patients in Hampshire and Dorset are taking part in a trial for a blood test aimed at detecting early stage Enlighten test looks for certain proteins that indicate the immune system is responding to the first signs of the is also being evaluated to see if it can identify the type of cancer by the Southampton Clinical Trials Unit, the Modernised study aims to recruit 1,000 patients across the two counties, with 450 already signed up. Ian Robinson, a 72 year-old grandfather from Fawley, agreed to take part in the Southampton trial after an NHS bowel cancer screening kit led to a diagnosis of colorectal said: "There were no symptoms, no pain, nothing, so you would never know until it was much more advanced and therefore much more difficult to treat."Obviously the team here is helping me, so I'm delighted to participate and hopefully help improve the way things are done." Researchers will take blood samples from people with 10 solid tumour types, including bladder, breast, lung, prostate, ovarian, pancreatic, oesophageal and will also include patients with colorectal tumours and melanoma, a type of skin Victoria Goss, Associate Professor and Head of Early Diagnosis Research at the Southampton Clinical Trials Unit, said: "When cancers are diagnosed later, there are often fewer treatment options available to patients. "Improving early diagnosis is therefore a priority for us as researchers and for the NHS. "But currently there are only four screening programmes in the UK and screening is only for one cancer at a time, so we are aiming to develop simple tests that can potentially pick up the signs of multiple cancers, giving the best possible chance of early, successful treatment."Southampton Clinical Trials Unit is working with biotech company Prototype Diagnostics with patients from hospitals in Portsmouth, Southampton, Bournemouth, Poole and trial, which is also due to open in Manchester, is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research Invention for Innovation programme and the Office for Life Sciences. You can follow BBC Dorset on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Country diary: The hours pass quickly when you're brushing for trees
We are at the Stori Brymbo heritage site, which was an iron mine and smelting plant until 1990. Outside it is cool, stormy and wet, but we're sheltered under a galvanised roof with the wind rattling and the rain tapping. Beneath us, a sandy, crumbling layer of rock formed 300m years ago from a great thickness of mud and silt that settled in a vast river delta system that once covered this part of Wales. If I squint my eyes, I imagine the vast, stifling, steaming jungle; no grass or flowers, just tall trunks towering above and ferns below, insects flying all around. This was the Carboniferous era in the tropics, long before any dinosaurs or other land animals, and the first 'trees' – club mosses, giant horsetails – grew by 10 to 30 metres in a few months, before dying and falling into the swamps to eventually form our coal. These plants grew so fast and abundantly that they changed the atmosphere, and hastened their own extinction, as we are now. Our guide, Dr Tom Hughes, who grew up locally, wrote his PhD thesis on this, and now he organises volunteers to gently dig and brush away the dust to reveal this ancient forest. The slow process has its rewards. I find a long trunk of Calamites, as thick as a man's arm, divided into sections. Some have curving leaves like giant centipedes. After a while, you get your eye in for the marks you're searching for. I did this so thoroughly on a field trip once as a student that I started seeing them in the wallpaper of the fish-and-chip shop afterwards. Among our other discoveries were a lovely black fern leaf and a bit of a beetle wing-case. Insects were often too delicate to fossilise, but there are dragonflies found at similar sites with 1m wingspans (I secretly hope I find one). Other patches like dark, shiny snakeskin turn out to be diamond-patterned Lepidodendron – another giant plant. The dusty hours pass quickly, until our old hips and knees have locked up. We stumble out into the sun for a drink and look at other treasure seekers' finds. Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at
Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
World's biggest study of trans children to include toddlers treated by NHS
The world's biggest study of trans children will include toddlers treated by the NHS. Children who are under 18 and already being treated by an NHS gender clinic for 'gender incongruence' are to be eligible for a new research project which is being launched today by King's College London. The 2024 Cass review found that the youngest child referred to a gender identity service (GIDS) run by the NHS was three years old. All NHS patients under 18 at gender clinics will be eligible for enrolment in the new study. Around 3,000 children and young people are expected to take part with the first participants to be on board by early autumn. The Cass review found that referrals to gender clinics had grown exponentially in the last decade with three-quarters of patients born female, it also found many patients have mental health conditions and autism. The researchers running the Pathways Horizon project expect the findings to shed light on the links between these trends and help unpick any potential mechanism as well as improving treatments. The study will contain ten times as many children as the largest previous studies and the investigators hope the data will provide better information to support trans children, their families and clinicians. Participants will be recruited over 3.5 years and the programme is one of a suite of five projects that received £10.7million in total funding and will run until 2031. One of the sister research projects, Pathways Trial, is planning to look into the role of puberty suppressants on children with gender incongruence and the data will crossover with the Horizon project. This project has not yet been approved by ethics boards or regulators and is not yet underway. The Horizon study launching today is observational and will only follow trans children throughout their normal NHS care and will involve annual questionnaires on wellbeing, mental and physical health, relationships and gender identity. Some of the main goals of the work are to understand how prevalence of gender incongruence — defined as a marked and persistent split between an individual's experienced gender and assigned sex — changes depending on sex, neurodivergence, autism, ADHD and other conditions. Dr Michael Absoud, a consultant in Paediatric Neurodisability at King's College London and Deputy Chief Investigator of Horizons said doctors 'know too little' about how different treatments work for their patients. 'This is why we're launching the Pathways Horizons today — to help fill the evidence gap,' he said. 'We know that a significant number of young people referred to the gender services are also neurodivergent, particularly those with autism, ADHD, or other cognitive differences and this study will help, in the future, to understand how neurodivergence intersects and overlaps with gender-related distress, and whether different types of support are needed to meet the unique needs of these young people presenting to our services. 'Ultimately, our goal is to help and shape the future services to help children, improve child health, support families, and also clinicians.' Little reliable data There is relatively little reliable data from large studies that follow participants for several years specifically on trans children and this study is designed to fill this void. Professor Emily Simonoff, Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at King's College London and Chief Investigator of the study, said NHS England decided a study was needed to improve knowledge following the Cass review. 'We were tasked as a group to develop a robust program of research that would address questions raised in the Cass report,' she said. 'We were not told what to do. This is a study that we designed as a group of investigators.' The scientists are hoping the work will improve knowledge on the characteristics of people using youth gender services and also will compare the results of different treatment approaches while following the children in greater detail than ever before. 'More comprehensive' analysis Professor Richard Emsley, the study's statistician at King's College London, said the analysis will be more comprehensive than previous work. 'This will include first childhood experiences, social transitioning, neurodiversity such as autism and ADHD, and mental health symptoms including anxiety, depression, eating problems, and difficulty managing emotions,' he said. He added that the first papers from the trial will be published in a couple of years and will likely shed light on who is most likely to be using the NHS gender clinics as children. 'This includes their demographic characteristics, the prevalence of birth registered sex, and co-occurring conditions such as autism and ADHD.' He added: 'We won't be directly comparing different interventions. The best way to compare different interventions is in randomised control trials, but it will help us understand, for example, which groups of children and young people need more intensive input, which ones need less intensive input. 'It will help us to identify whether certain kinds of treatment packages seem to be more linked with good outcomes than others. 'That will allow us to develop further research in the future to pit interventions against each other or develop them in more detail.'
