SCUBA diving members of Eurobodalla’s Nature Coast Marine Group are set to begin an ambitious program of marine life surveys in the Batemans Marine Park area over the coming months.
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The group has been awarded a community action grant under the Australian Government’s “Caring for our Country” program to survey marine biodiversity.
“We are very pleased and grateful to have been awarded this grant,” project co-ordinator Bill Barker said.
“Not only will it enable us to carry out important work aimed at promoting conservation of our marine environment, but it is also an endorsement of the concept of community science.”
The project has started with work on the iconic but endangered grey nurse shark, which migrates into South Coast waters each summer.
“The Grey Nurse Shark is classified as critically endangered and an important part of efforts to promote their recovery is finding out more about their numbers and habits,” Mr Barker said.
Working with local dive operators, PureScuba of Batemans Bay and Underwater Safaris of Narooma, Nature Coast Marine Group divers will visit the Tollgate Islands and Montague Island each month until April to count sharks, to determine their sex and size and to record any noteworthy behaviour.
“We have already been out to Montague and the Tollgates once each in the last two weeks,” he said.
“We found at least three grey nurse sharks at Montague Island but none yet at the Tollgates, possibly because of the colder water there.”
Bill added that there has been some controversy in recent years over shark numbers, particularly around Montague Island.
He said the project aimed to gather hard data that will help Marine Park and Fisheries managers and scientists in their research and planning and also provide information to the wider community.
“A really interesting innovation in grey nurse shark research is the use of underwater photography to identify individual sharks,” he said.
“This involves taking photos of grey nurse sharks, which have distinctive spot patterns on their sides.
“These spot patterns are a kind of fingerprint, unique to the individual animal, and by using non-invasive photographic techniques in conjunction with pattern recognition software we can identify and record individuals’ movements.
“Our photos will be part of a large database and will make it possible to track sharks as they migrate north and south.”
The Nature Coast Marine Group will work with Macquarie University’s “Spot a Shark” program, which has the software and expertise to analyze the photographic data.
A workshop for NCMG divers participating in the program was held at Batemans Bay last Saturday.
Peter Simpson, from the Spot a Shark program, came from Sydney for the event to explain the program, the photographic techniques and the software.
The project has two other components. One will be surveys of the threatened black cod, a large fish of the grouper/cod family.
They used to be fairly common along the NSW coastline but are now uncommon and on the South Coast are not seen as mature adults.
The second will be gathering basic data on biodiversity from 20 sites regularly surveyed by the NCMG.
