Francis Neat

World Maritime University | WMU · Global Ocean Institute

This study compares the diversity of the demersal fish assemblage of an isolated shelf sea, the Rockall plateau, with that of the nearest adjacent continental shelf sea ecosystem, the west coast of Scotland. Bottom trawl surveys were carried out between 1986 and 2008 on the Rockall plateau and the adjacent shelf sea to the west of Scotland. All dem...

It was hypothesized that energetically efficient anguilliform swimming and axial elongation in fishes is favoured in the deep sea and predicted that the degree of elongation of the body form of fishes would increase with depth. An index of fish shape was derived from the relationship between length and mass. This was combined with data on abundance...

In order to evaluate if marine protected areas (MPAs) can be expected to confer conservation benefits to large, mobile marine species it is important to assess their site fidelity and habitat ranging patterns. The flapper skate (Dipterus cf. intermedia) is a large, threatened elasmobranch for which MPAs are being considered on the west coast of Sco...

Commercial fisheries risk unintentionally depleting local population components if stock management units do not reflect the population structure of the species. Atlantic cod Gadus morhua L. was over exploited in the sea areas around the British Isles in the last century and is struggling to recover. There is an urgent need to define the biological...

The deep sea is the world's largest ecosystem [1], with high levels of biodiversity [2, 3] and many species that exhibit life-history characteristics that make them vulnerable to high levels of exploitation [4]. Many fisheries in the deep sea have a track record of being unsustainable [5, 6]. In the northeast Atlantic, there has been a decline in t...

In fisheries, operational management units and biological data often do not coincide. In many cases, this is not even known due to the lack of information about a species’ population structure or behaviour. This study focuses on two such species, the common ling Molva molva and the blue ling M. dypterygia, two Northeast Atlantic gadoids with overla...

The recent proliferation of pelagic Sargassum spp. in the Tropical Atlantic causes major ecological and socioeconomic impacts to the wider Caribbean when it washes ashore, with regional fisheries and tourism industries particularly affected. The Caribbean influxes have been tracked to a new bloom region known as the North Equatorial Recirculation R...

Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing is a complex and multifaceted problem, with dire consequences for aquatic ecosystems, coastal communities, fishers and fish workers, and economic and national security. It particularly affects developing countries, and is estimated to cost the global economy USD 20 billion each year. This represents...

The recently proclaimed Ocean Decade by the United Nations General Assembly is committed to gender equality and women’s empowerment in ocean science research and governance. This paper examines the status of gender equality in ocean science research across higher education institutes in Kenya. Kenya has ratified international conventions for gender...

Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing is widely recognised as a transdisciplinary problem requiring holistic action at international, regional and national level. IUU fishing implicates many different areas, including fisheries and oceans sustainability, safety at sea, working conditions on board fishing vessels, food security and livel...

Central to the achievement of the transformational vision and ambitions of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (Ocean Decade) is human behavioral change. Fundamentally, these changes must embrace equality, diversity, inclusivity, accountability, and transparency. The Ocean Decade offers an unprecedented opportunit...

Since the 1950s, there has been an increase of women participating in ocean-going science. However, the number of women scientists in the field remains significantly less than that of men, especially in senior roles. In this commentary, we take a feminist perspective to understand the challenges women face in pursuing a career in ocean-going scienc...

Report of first CAPFISH project workshop (October 2021)

The scuba diving industry is vital to economies of Small Island Developing States (SIDS), providing a pivotal opportunity to realise their blue economy aspirations. This industry is fundamentally dependent on both the health of the marine environment coupled with a skilled and safe underwater labour force. This article explores the interlinkages be...

Demand for seafood products is increasing worldwide, contributing to ever more complex supply chains and posing challenges to trace their origin and guarantee legal, well-managed, sustainable sources from confirmed locations. While DNA-based methods have proven to be reliable in verifying seafood authenticity at the species level, the verification...

Demand for seafood products is increasing worldwide, contributing to ever more complex supply chains and posing challenges to trace their origin and guarantee legal, well-managed, sustainable sources from confirmed locations. While DNA-based methods have proven to be reliable in verifying seafood authenticity at the species level, the verification...

NOTE - A CORRIGENDUM OF THIS WORK HAS BEEN PUBLISHED: Seasonal and ontogenetic variations in depth use by benthic species are often concomitant with changes in their spatial distribution. This has implications for the efficacy of spatial conservation measures such as marine protected areas (MPAs). The critically endangered flapper skate (Dipturus...

The ICES/IUCN-CEM FEG Workshop on Testing OECM Practices and Strategies (WKTOPS) investigated how to evaluate areas with spatial fisheries measures in place as other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs) in line with Convention on Biological Diversity definitions, specifically the extent to which area-based fisheries management measure...

According to the most recent taxonomical revision, the deep-sea dogfish genus Deania encompasses four species. Three of them, D. calcea, D. profundorum, and D. hystricosa, occur in the North Atlantic. Whilst D. profundorum can be identified by the presence of a subcaudal keel, the other two species are not easily visually distinguished. Uncertainti...

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The Rosemary Bank Seamount in the NE Atlantic was designated a Marine Protected Area in 2014 by the Scottish Government. Visual and trawl surveys of the seamount have been undertaken since 2007. Here these data are compiled and analysed to provide an assessment of the communities of demersal fish and benthic invertebrates found there. The fish and...

Tope (Galeorhinus galeus) is a highly mobile elasmobranch in the temperate to subtropical northeast Atlantic. It is highly migratory and has been shown to display complex movement patterns, such as partial migration, in the southern hemisphere. In the northeast Atlantic, previous mark-recapture studies have struggled to identify movement patterns a...

Discovery and understanding of fragile deep-sea habitats like sponge aggregations, are being outpaced by anthropogenic resource exploitation. Sustainable ocean development in the Faroe-Shetland Channel Nature Conservation Marine Protected Area (FSC NCMPA; northeast Atlantic), which harbors sponge aggregations, now requires adaptive management in th...

Barendse et al. use DNA barcoding to validate species composition of 1402 certified seafood products. Below 1 % were mislabelled suggesting fisheries certification reduces seafood fraud.

The Hatton-Rockall plateau in the northeast Atlantic Ocean has long been the subject of interest for fishers, prospectors, conservationists, managers, planners, and politicians. As a feature that straddles national and international waters, it is subject to a multitude of competing and confounding regulations, making the development of a holistic m...

p>In international fisheries management, scientific advice on the presence of "vulnerable marine ecosystems" (VMEs) per United Nations resolutions, has generally used qualitative assessments based on expert judgment of the occurrence of indicator taxa such as cold-water corals and sponges. Use of expert judgment alone can be criticized for inconsis...

Background: Voluntary sustainability standards and eco-labels are market-based mechanisms used to encourage producers and consumers toward environmental sustainability. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is one such program which aims to improve the state of the world's oceans and promote a sustainable seafood market. Now in its 21st year, with a...

• Micropopulation processes, such as gene flow, operating within geographic regions are often poorly understood, despite their potential to affect stock structure and sustainability. This is especially true for highly mobile species, such as elasmobranchs, where the potential for spatial overlap of regional populations is increased as a result of g...

Motivation: The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community led open-source database of biodiversity time se...

Intraspecific diversity promotes evolutionary change, and when partitioned among geographic regions or habitats can form the basis for speciation. Marine species live in an environment that can provide as much scope for diversification in the vertical as in the horizontal dimension. Understanding the relevant mechanisms will contribute significantl...

High definition video from a towed camera system was used to describe the deep-sea benthic habitats within an elongate depression located at the western margin of Rockall Bank in the Hatton–Rockall Basin. At depths greater than 1190 m, an extensive area (10 km long by 1.5 km wide) of what appeared to be reduced sediments, bacterial mats and floccul...

This study investigated taxonomic validity of the pale ghost shark Hydrolagus pallidus Hardy & Stehmann, 1990, which was described as a species distinct from the smalleyed rabbitfish H. affinis (de Brito Capello 1868). While few morphological characters distinguish the two taxa, a striking difference in sex ratio and fixed differences (1·1–1·6% div...

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) were measured in environmental samples (sponges, fish and sediment) collected in 2014 and 2016 from the Faroe-Shetland Channel and Rosemary Bank Seamount. These data could be used to provide a baseline against which any changes can be assessed in the event of an oil spill and contribute to any environmental i...

A dense aggregation of the roundnose grenadier Coryphaenoides rupestris was observed with a towed camera at a depth of 1500 m in the Rockall Trough during September. The density of fish was 100 times greater than other sites. Within the aggregation the fish showed directional alignment, rapid swimming actions, mid-water swimming and social interact...

Size-based indicators are well established as a management tool in shelf seas as they respond to changes in fishing pressure and describe important aspects of community function. In the deep sea, however, vital rates are much slower and body size relationships vary with depth, making it less clear how size-based indicators can be applied and whethe...

Population genetic studies of species inhabiting the deepest parts of the oceans are still scarce and only until recently we started to understand how oceanographic processes and topography affect dispersal and gene flow patterns. The aim of this study was to investigate the spatial population genetic structure of the bathyal bony fish Coryphaenoid...

Coryphaenoides mediterraneus microsatellites genotypes. This file contains the microsatellites genotypes for the 375 specimens of C. mediterraneus (Cmed). The file is in genepop 3 digits format, which is widely used and can be easily converted in other types of files. It contains the genotypes for the 9 nuclear loci screened in the 8 localities stu...

Biodiversity is well studied in ecology and the concept has been developed to include traits of species, rather than solely taxonomy, to better reflect the functional diversity of a system. The deep sea provides a natural environmental gradient within which to study changes in different diversity metrics, but traits of deep-sea fish are not widely...

Deep-sea fish stocks consist of species that live at depths of greater than 400 metres. While being important for EU fisheries, this natural renewable resource is particularly vulnerable to over-fishing, as many deep sea species are slow-growing and commonly of low fecundity. Generally little is known about the biology of deep sea species, and ther...