Big Thanks
National Heritage Lottery
The Studland Seahorse Project has now been running since early 2009. The first year was funded by the National Lottery Your Heritage Fund. This funding allowed us to tag a number of seahorses and learn a great deal about them. In this first season, we had many seahorses getting pregnant and giving birth a number of times. We have also learned that they definitely form partnerships for at least one season, and keep to the same territory for the breeding season.
Beauty Kitchen
Our friends at Beauty Kitchen are on a mission to create the most effective, natural, and sustainable beauty products in the world – with B Corp & Cradle to Cradle principles in mind. Beauty Kitchen have continually sponsored our work at The Seahorse Trust over the years by committing to donating 1% of sales (not profits!) of their award winning, 100% vegan Seahorse Plankton+ range – most recently to The Studland Seahorse Project.
Click on their logo below to go to the website
New Conservation Zone
PROTECTING THE SEAGRASS MEADOWS
Studland Bay is now a Marine Conservation Zone (MCZ) and we hope this recognition will ensure that the existing laws will be enforced to protect this rapidly disappearing species.
With our partners at Boatfolk and others we are starting to install Ecomoorings onto the site to help protect the seagrass and the seahorses.
Visit Boatfolk’s Coastline Deadline page to learn about their environmental work.
lick on the logo below to go to their page.
Also check out about Ecomoorings on our Ecomooring page on this site
CLICK HERE
Identifying Seahorses
THROUGH THE NEW TECHNIQUE OF PHOTO IDENTIFICATION
After a number of years working at Studland, we have now changed our method of identifying seahorses from the original tags to photo identification. This means that we can identify individuals on the study site. This allows us to build up an intimate picture of each seahorse and its ecology. By taking high-resolution pictures, strictly without flash as it can kill seahorses, we use a system of spot clusters to identify the seahorses. Although the tagging was not intrusive we want to minimise any contact with the seahorses if we can, and so this method has been used since late 2013. The project is proposed to go on for a number of years so that we can gather a great deal of information about these amazing animals, particularly as their site is under threat from overuse. We hope that the data we collate will allow us to put together a management plan for the site so that there will be seahorses there for generations to come.
