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The Mystery of an Irish Sea Lough A mysterious tale of disappearing marine sponges in a unique lough in county Cork could yet have a happy ending. A team led by Bangor University alumni and Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington Professor of Marine Biology, James Bell and including Professor John Turner from the School of Ocean Sciences has been studying the loss of possibly thousands of sponges from the underwater cliffs inside Lough Hyne (Loch Oighinn). The team secured funding from the National Parks and Wildlife Service of the Irish Government’s Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, to study this unusual event.
While it remains unclear why so many of these sponges experienced such a strong decline in numbers between about 2010 and 2015, in the past couple of years, there have been signs of a potential natural recovery of the affected species. In a recent paper published in Science of the Total Environment, the authors discuss the possible reasons for the drop in numbers and the implications for life in other temperate mesophotic ecosystems (TMEs), a layer of the sea floor typically extending from about 20 metres to 30m below the surface to 150m, and home for numerous invertebrates like sponges, sea fans and sea anemones. The researchers used 30 years of scientific surveys (1990-2019) and opportunistic observations on the subtidal communities of Lough Hyne to gain insights on the long-term stability and vulnerability of those ecosystems. They then considered the possible causes of observed changes and discussed the importance of regular monitoring for TME conservation around the world. School of Ocean Sciences Professor John Turner first dived lough Hyne in 1981 while leading a student expedition from the University of Bristol, and returned to use video to record changes to subtidal communities throughout the 1990s during Bangor diving field courses to Lough Hyne.
