This week Ed and I had a very exciting day at Gibraltar Point National Nature Reserve with Vicki Bush and the public engagement team. On Tuesday we were helping out with their Marine Day event. It was an all-day event for families to attend; in the morning we had indoor activities which involved some marine crafts and quizzes.

The marine crafts were really fun and dynamic; they went down so well with everyone who attended. I was helping out making crab hats and Ed was over on the other craft table making egg carton jellyfish. Crafts are a great way to learn without even realising. For instance, the crab hat allows you to get people thinking about how many legs a crab has, how many pincers do they have or even where are their eyes? The best part of it all being that at the end of the craft they got to take their handmade toys home.

The first quiz involved trying to guess how long different types of rubbish took to disappear from the ocean and for the most part I found that it takes a lot longer than you might think. Hopefully this activity will help remind everyone (including myself!) how important it is to pick up litter. The aim of the second quiz was to match shells from the beach to a photo of the animal and its name; an excellent way to learn about the animals that used to live in the shells so many of us love to collect.

There was also an adventure trail from the crafts centre down to the beach. There were different question and activities to do along the way and if you came back with your worksheet filled in, you won a prize! Definitely a worthwhile trade-off if you ask me.

After lunch we made our way down to the beach with the few families that remained, to brave the wind and rain, for… SEADIPPING. This was our first experience of both Gibraltar Point beach and sea dipping, so the weather was not about to put us off! I’m pleased to say that everyone had an amazing time and we caught large numbers of incredible diversity including shrimp, crabs, pipefish, flatfish, starfish, jellyfish, hermit crabs and razor clams. Everyone got stuck and in and stayed till the end by which time the sun had come back again (typical British summers for you). Overall, we had a great day and were very glad to be involved. It was so interesting to see the variety of ways to make marine science engaging and interactive to people of all ages and backgrounds!

For the rest of that week, we did some work on our Oyster restoration project as we had some feedback to a written piece of work that we are producing, we met with a colleague at DEFRA to discuss their work on marine Natural Capital as part of our project looking at that topic and independently both progressed our individual projects.

Kiera

Ed here, with not too much to report from our 10^th week! After a very busy few weeks in and out of work, it was nice to have some time back in the office to really get stuck in on project work. As well as continuing our research on natural capital, native oysters, circular economy and smelt, we have been preparing project proposals on these topics to circulate around the partner organisations. This has involved back and forth with the relevant partners to each project, in order to create project proposals that both reflect our interests and are of value to the partner organisations (Orsted, Natural England, The Crown Estate, as well as Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust). We are benefitting so much from all the interactions and feedback we are experiencing from these different organisations, and are aiming to circulate our project proposals in the coming weeks. Next week is a quieter week again, then after that it all kicks off again!

Ed