Why are the Cornish different, because they are Cornish!

Dr Donnelly’s team looked in detail at the DNA of 2,039 Britons from all parts of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, each of whose grandparents had all been born within 80km of each other. They thus, in effect, sampled the distribution of genetic material in the country in 1885 (the average year of the birth of these grandparents), before the large-scale internal population movements of the 20th century had had a chance to confuse the issue. The results divided into 17 genetic clusters, illustrated on the map, which form a pattern that conforms quite well with what an historian might have predicted, but with some interesting wrinkles.

Cornwall, too, clusters separately from England. Indeed, as all good Cornish would have suspected, it clusters separately even from Devon (which is itself also genetically different from England).

Full story in the Economist here:

When is a bass not a bass? That is the question.

Straight talking fish talk from the far west of Cornwall - the @CoastalK9 telling it like it is.

What future for Bigouden's artisanal fishermen?

This is an extract from review of a book called 'Red Hats and Breton Caps' written by Charles Menzies. It looks at investigating a desire to move towards an artisanal model fishery rather than capitalist - something that might find some sympathy and empathy here in the South West. The term 'artisanal worker' does not have an equivalent here in English - in France it is a recognition of more than just skilled in the art of making or producing - artisanal workers have equal status to those in professions like medicine and education - more so where they are key to the identity of a community

"Charles Menzies, the artisanal model is far from being condemned, it is contrary to the operating mode of capitalism today that subcontracts increasingly random production activities to small units and decentralizes. For him, the resistance movement and 1993-94 revolt, is in a conservative logic of the status quo against a state (EU) increasingly restrictive and liberal, opening the European market to the winds. They want to preserve an artisanal system that seems archaic to Brussels officials and even some local politicians like former MP Ambroise Guellec. 

The Bigoudens engaged in a battle at European and even international level to preserve their way of life. If they contest the opening to fish around the world, they also know that resistance requires openness to other artisanal fishermen worldwide. Thus they were able to accommodate in October 2000 in Loctudy, the Constituent Assembly of the World Forum of artisanal fishers. They also seek answers to resource management problems, trawl selectivity, biodiversity protection. They promoted and supported the creation of a marine park and engaged in the steps Natura 2000 in their fishing grounds. The battle is far from won. It will be lost if ITQs lead concentration, the collapse of the collective dynamics of resistance to an individualistic struggle for survival and accumulation of fishing rights. There are many other challenges and analysis of Charles Menzies draws attention to some. The first concerns the renewal of men as bosses sailors. The patterns come from a small community. The demographic decline as the attractiveness of other jobs reduce the pond. Added to the uncertainty related to the constraints of European policy that does more than this scale fishing, even though it boasts of defending the little fishing.

It is necessary to attract new patrons from other areas; it is also necessary to attract and retain sailors. Revenues remain attractive, but they are no longer sufficient to offset the difficult working conditions, especially because of the difficult to reconcile work rhythm with normal family life. This is all the more difficult to accept that women seek their autonomy access to employment and their income can compensate for the instability and insecurity of fishing income. It will probably why design a new organization of work. 

A new phenomenon, as the severity of job opportunities in other sectors, can bring back to fishing many young people. The phenomenon is noticeable in agriculture and maritime schools that recruit new. These newcomers, not always from fishermen media can bring new blood and new visions of fishing. Charles Menzies does not directly mention a more recent problem, the cost of energy. This is an important challenge for a fleet-based trawl tradition, but it is a challenge to the whole economy and society: how to get out of a carbon economy in the medium term?

Charles Menzies offers bigoudens fishermen, even as they lose their autonomy Local Committee, a gift, full of empathy, rigorous and uncompromising. It primarily conveys a message of hope: there is a future for artisanal fishing. It would really be necessary to translate the book that will be helpful to fishermen and bigoudènes families but to all decision makers and NGOs who want to think instead of fishermen without really understanding the foundations of their social and economic system and make a simplistic idea artisanal fisheries."

The full report is here:

Allocating fishing in the EU - latest policy document from Brussels.

This study proposes a set of criteria and indicators for the purpose of allocating fishing opportunities in EU Member States, which according to Article 17 of the new CFP should include those of an environmental, social and economic nature.

The proposed criteria and indicators should be applicable in a wide range of circumstances therefore the term allocation in this study should be understood in a broad sense referring to any aspect of giving access to fishing opportunities.

Looks like warmer water is heading our way!

The Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) Remote Sensing Group (RSG) activities are centred on the remote-sensing of the Earth's ocean and atmosphere. The group comprises a multi-disciplinary team of scientists with expertise in remote-sensing, physics, meteorology, engineering, computer vision and computer science. The group's activities evolve around the validation of remotely-sensed data, the efficient processing of these data and ways of intelligently exploiting them for real-world problems.

Sea surface temperature (SST) data are used to observe physical phenomena such as currents, fronts, and eddies, and SST is an important factor controlling biological activity or influencing animal behaviour. SST data are produced by NEODAAS from the AVHRR series at ~1 km resolution (at nadir). Approximately 14 AVHRR passes are received at Dundee per day and provide typically 4-6 views of any location over the UK and surrounding coastal/oceanic waters. NEODAAS can provide consistent products from the near 30 years long AVHRR archive. The processing involves calibration, SST calculation and geo-correction within pre-defined regions of interest. Weekly composites comprising all the cloud free portions over 7 days are also produced (e.g. Fig. 1). Finally, individual images and composites are placed on the web site. SST is produced for regions outside the Dundee range, for cruises or observatories worldwide, via automatic data downloads from NOAA. SST is also produced from MODIS and on request can be obtained from ESA’s AATSR. In high cloud situations, such as the Arabian Sea monsoon, cloud-penetrating microwave SST products from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) and Tropical Rainfall Mapping Mission Microwave Imager (TMI) can be provided, courtesy of Remote Sensing Systems Inc, at low-resolution data (25-km). NEODAAS maintains an archive of global 4 km or 9 km temporal composites from NASA including AVHRR-Pathfinder and MODIS. Composites are useful to construct time series at medium resolution or over synoptic scales. NEODAAS have started a collaboration with the UK Met Office/GODAE High-resolution SST-Pilot Project (GHRSST-PP) to provide the entire NEODAAS AVHRR archive in L2P format for ingestion into the GHRSST product. In the future NEODAAS will use the MetOp AVHRR and follow-on instruments on the NASA/NOAA National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) and NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) and ESA Sentinel-3.

Council adopts measures to help sea bass to recover

(26/03/2015) The Council has adopted measures to help sea bass recover. For recreational fishing, which accounts for 25% of sea bass mortality, the decision will mean the introduction of a limit of three fish per day per angler. Learn more about sea bass with our infographic (available in English and in French).

Sea bass is a very valuable fish, on which many fishermen, especially small fishing enterprises, depend. With over 1.3m recreational anglers in France and another 800 000 in the UK, many thousands of jobs also depend on recreational fishing.

Recent scientific analyses have reinforced previous concerns about the state of the stock and advised urgently to reduce fishing by 80%. We are witnessing a rapid decline of sea bass that risks leading to a collapse if no action is taken. 

The daily limit on recreational catches complements the emergency measures which the Commission adopted earlier this year, and which targeted pelagic fisheries.

The Commission has previously taken such emergency measures to protect vulnerable stocks, most recently with anchovy in the Bay of Biscay.

STOP TINKERING WITH THE UK'S UNDER 10 METRE FISHING FLEET!

Sign the petition!

Drop plans to cap under 10 metre fishing licences and commit to longer term management plans that provide a fairer distribution of UK Total Allowable Catch.

Why is this important?

DEFRA is consulting the fishing industry to identify ways and means of providing more fishing opportunity for vessels classed as Under 10 metres.

They plan to identify vessels that have not fished during a set period (a reference period) and limit the future landing potential of these vessels so severely as to render the licences worthless and unable to support a living wage. A similar scheme was run several years ago with little or no impact on the under 10 metre fleet's ability to catch it's allocated quota but considerable impact on the ability within small coastal communities to improve, expand or diversify within inshore fisheries.

Capped licences reduce future flexibility and diversity in inshore fisheries of England and Wales and prove punitive in the longer term. These capped licences provide a short term gain by creating the illusion of more quota but are likely to create a much longer term problem and potentially limit the future development of sustainable inshore fisheries as fish stocks improve.

Also, the manner in which licences are capped and the selection process rarely takes account of personal circumstances tending to be a one size fits all approach that fails to recognise an individual's investment towards future goals.

DEFRA needs to take heed of the majority of fishermen in this inshore sector and ditch the capping scheme, to explore more equitable and longer term policies that support inshore fleets - not punishing them.

Show our support andd sign the petition here please: