A diver part of a conservation group was thrilled to capture footage of an elusive marine giant in northern Scotland.
The creature is not Nessie, the legendary monster that lures thousands of hopeful tourists to Loch Ness each year, but a flapper skate. As a BBC Countryfile article reports, the sighting took place in the Orkney Islands, an archipelago just north of the mainland. The flapper skate is the largest of all European skates and exceedingly rare.
The significance of the sighting was not lost on the diver who captured the footage, Daniel Wise of the Orkney Skate Trust.
He said, "As a commercial diver I have been fortunate to spend time with flapper skates in the wild, and as a marine biologist I knew this was a fortunate and unique position to find myself in due to their low numbers."
A over 8.2 feet in length and weighing in at over 225 pounds, the flapper skate makes for an impressive sight. The article helpfully compares its dimensions to a king-sized bed, though one would imagine there are slightly safer options for a nap than the back of a giant sea creature. The flapper skate performs an important role as a roving sea clean-up crew, hunting down weak and sickly fish. Once plentiful, they are now classed as critically endangered due to overfishing.
As NatureScot pointed out, the main problems for the flapper skate's population are that it takes a decade to reach maturity, adults produce few young, and the eggs take 18 months to hatch. That's still a lot less than its deep-sea cousin in the Pacific, which takes four years. The Scottish government has taken steps to establish protected areas for the skates, and their numbers are recovering, albeit slowly.
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Capturing footage of a rare species in the wild can help galvanize conservation efforts by raising public awareness and underling the importance of local action. Nature is resilient, and with a little helping hand, threatened species can thrive once more.
As Daniel Wise said to the BBC, "Once you mess with a system it's so hard to get that to balance out again, so we need these fish to come back. … I'm hopeful this can happen with some simple conservation measures."
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