Sea Deep took to the road this summer with the newest member of our team, Tag! Tag is a life-sized model of a flapper skate, a species that can live up to 100 years old and grow up to 3m in length…  

We’re very lucky to share our seas with this local giant; however, despite once being abundant, (so much so that it used to be referred to as the common skate!), the flapper skate is now classified as critically endangered on the IUCN red list. Declines resulted mainly from historic commercial and recreational over fishing, with anglers having once traveled to Northern Ireland from all over Europe to catch this impressive species.

The flapper skate is now protected under the NI Wildlife Order (1985). This ensures they can no longer be commercially fished, and a license is required to catch, tag and photograph this species. 

However, even with this protection in place, the flapper skate remains vulnerable. The slow life history characteristics that this skate shares with many other elasmobranchs (sharks, skates and rays) mean their populations take a long time to bounce back from declines. For example, many sharks and skates are slow to reach reproductive maturity, produce few offspring, and have rest years where they don’t reproduce at all.  

The Sea Deep team are working hard, in partnership with the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA), to gather information that will inform the designation of a Marine Protected Area (MPA) specific to the flapper skate. An MPA is an area of the sea that is managed to protect certain marine species and habitats. This MPA would protect important sites to the flapper skate, such as nursery grounds. Protecting these areas from disturbance will help the flapper skate remain stable in our seas and offer an opportunity for their numbers to recover. 

This Summer, to raise the profile of this incredible species, Tag and the Sea Deep team visited the coastal towns of Portrush, Glenarm, Portavogie and Portballintrae. We were delighted to see how many enthusiastic shark and skate lovers turned up! We played fishy games, talked about shark facts and myths, and even explored the shorelines to look for shark and skate egg cases.  

Members of the public also signed our cardboard flapper skate to show that they care about this species and want to see better protection for it in our waters!  

In between Flapper Skate Roadshows, we hosted a number of shark and skate egg case hunts. People joined us from all over the country to get involved, conserving our local sharks and skates without even having to get in the water!  With the public's help, we recorded a whopping 493 egg cases from June to September!  

Surveying for shark and skate egg cases provides us with very useful information about what species are present in our waters and how they might be using the waters around our coasts. For example, finding loads of egg cases off a particular shoreline might indicate the presence of a nursery ground – allowing us to focus our conservation efforts in that area.

Finally, we hosted more elasmobranch tagging training sessions and recruited several new volunteer anglers over the summer months! The Sea Deep project is supported by the valuable work of dedicated anglers across Northern Ireland, who have undergone Sea Deep best practice training to handle, tag and release sharks and skates. They feed information back to us about what species they are catching, where they’re catching them, and other important information such as size and the sex of the animals caught. This provides us with invaluable data that, in combination with our egg case survey results, helps us focus our conservation efforts in the right places.

Don't worry if you have not been able to join any of our events yet, as we have one more Roadshow coming up. We'll be in the Ulster Museum on the 9th October from 11am with Tag, so please do come and join in! 

Finally, don't forget to tell us about any shark and skate egg cases you find at your local beach.  Find out more about what they look like and how to submit your records at - seadeepno.org/eggcase