Shoring up knowledge by the lake

WOULD that the marine biologists working on eradicating Sargassum, an invasive brown weed, at Lough Hyne in west Cork, found a way to eliminate the green weed plaguing shallow bays all over Ireland.

Besides studying the Sargassum, Dr Colin Little, of Bristol University, Dr Cynthia Trowbridge, of the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, and Dr Rob McAllen, of UCC, are monitoring the changes in the shore fauna and flora of the lough, a sea-water lake a kilometre long and almost as wide connected to the Atlantic Ocean by a narrow channel. The tides filling Lough Hyne twice a day create a habitat of warm, well-oxygenated water supporting a diversity of marine plants and animals, including 72 fish species. Dr Little has been monitoring Lough Hyne annually since 1979, and Dr Trowbridge was recently awarded a National Science Foundation International grant of $150,000 to continue the work and study sea urchin settlement.

Earlier this year, an engaging book, Lough Hyne, The Marine Researchers — in Pictures was compiled by Terri Kearney, with funding from UCC and The Gwendoline Harold Barry Trust.

Published by the Skibbereen Heritage Centre, it is a joyous portrait of the scientists and volunteers who have worked at the lake, including a portrait of the then hirsute Dr Little in 1991. All gung-ho, sun-tanned and in shorts or diving suits, the summer research students from Irish and overseas universities are seen camping on the lakeshore and lending a holiday feeling to the dedicated work of discovery.

Publication of the photographs commemorates the efforts of those who explored the lake’s habitat over the decades and who helped to enshrine Lough Hyne as one of the most important marine habitats in Europe.

Europe’s first marine nature reserve, it is now in its 30th year.

The opening picture in the book is dated 1885, and is of a group of men aboard ship, many sporting beards and bowler hats, a Royal Irish Academy dredging party. Some were members of the first ‘expedition’ which, led by Rev. Spotswood Green (surely an ecological moniker), entered the lake in a rowing boat in 1886, took sediment samples and surveyed the shallows.

By 1922, Robert Lloyd Praeger, doyen of Irish naturalists, had drawn Lough Hyne’s unique qualities to the attention of Frenchman Louis Renouf, a professor of zoology at UCC. He spent three days at the lake in February, 1923 and, sufficiently impressed, rented a cottage nearby for the summer. The following year, he set up a laboratory in Baltimore, and, as his notes record, ‘a really serious start was made.’ The subsequent story unfolds in photographs of the researchers over the decades, their ‘work-in-progress’ and reproductions of their notes and letters, all interestingly captioned. As is always the case with pictures of times past — the faces, the outfits, the backdrops to the story (the lakeshore tents, the local people bringing milk to the creamery, the ‘host families’ that offered accommodation to the students, the cook-ins in makeshift kitchens and the groups gathered around the communal dining table for evening meals) — all combine to vividly convey the espirit-de-corps of those summer expeditions to Lough Hyne.

As the years pass, the girls are more daring. Working hard in their shorts, swimsuits or sou’westers, they combine the dedication of ‘land girls’ in the second world war with the elegance of bathing belles in a Busby Berkeley musical. In time, the monochrome images are replaced by pictures in glorious colour. The last photograph — of a group of schoolchildren visiting the lake — was taken in Heritage Week 2010.

We read in the introduction that “while there are 450 scientific papers based on studies carried out on the lake, very little is known about the people who worked there and brought it to prominence in the scientific world.” This book, with an average of three photographs per page over its 94 pages, forever corrects that omission. In A4 format, it is tastefully produced, with a striking black-and-white cover. Within its pages, the hard work, cooperation and warmth that has brought students and scientists from all over the world to Lough Hyne, and enshrined it as a unique part of Ireland’s heritage, is deservedly celebrated.

* Lough Hyne, The Marine Researchers available at bookshops, RRP €15.