The Clyde Sea is just one small area of Scotland’s waters. Covering 3600 square kilometres, it amounts to less than 1% of Scotland’s seas. Yet, it is amongst the most studied and debated stretches.
As Elaine Whyte, Executive Secretary of the Clyde Fishermen’s Association wrote in the Herald’s The Future of Clyde Fishing series last week, “The level of attention the Clyde attracts in terms of fishing given the size of the marine area is truly astounding.”
That attention, however, is not without good reason. The Firth of Clyde, as a 2021 paper published by marine scientists Joshua Lawrence and Paul Fernandes described, “is one of the most anthropogenically impacted marine environments in the world”.
Over the past couple of centuries overfishing, pollution, shipping, industry, fishfarming and other human processes have made an impression on the life that makes its home there.
Last week, along with Herald writers Sandra Dick and James McEnaney, I looked at the controversies that surround Clyde Sea fisheries and marine environment and whether Scotland is doing what is needed to foster a thriving sea, as well as a future for fishers and their wider rural communities.
The Clyde, we learned, had not become a ‘marine desert’, as a landmark 2010 paper had warned, but it has been changed by us. Marine life in the Clyde goes on, as does the fishing. But it is not the same life, nor the same fishing as it was a century ago, and that history of change was described by Sandra Dick iin a Herald article last week.
These days the fishing is langoustine/prawn, often called nephrops, not cod or haddock. The biomass, as various papers have described, is still there, but the species balance is different - and that matters at a time of biodiversity crisis.
But also, it’s worth looking at the Clyde because one of the key marine protection measures the Scottish Government has set in place has been particularly controversial. A seasonal closure to whitefish trawling in an area where cod are believed to spawn was suddenly extended to include a ban on prawn........