Analysis of the temporal and spatial distribution of 686 records of egg masses and egg mass groups from (i) recreational divers and posted in the various public media, (ii) scientific survey data collected during research programs and (iii) publications in peer-reviewed literature plus published and unpublished information on the seasonality of the occurrence of mature females, demonstrated that the reproductio...
WGCEPH worked on six Terms of Reference. These involved reporting on the status of stocks; reviewing advances in stock identification, assessment for fisheries management and for the Ma- rine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), including some exploratory stock assessments; re- viewing impacts of human activities on cephalopods; developing identification guides and rec- ommendations for fishery data collection;...
Long-term monitoring datasets are fundamental to understand physical and ecological responses to environmental changes, supporting management and conservation. The data should be reliable, with the sources of bias identified and quantified. CETUS Project is a cetacean monitoring programme in the Eastern North Atlantic, based on visual methods of data collection. This study aims to assess data quality and bias i...
Although cephalopod fisheries are of world-wide importance, in Europe catching cephalopods is managed only in small-scale fisheries, at national level, and few stocks are formally assessed. Because cephalopods are not quota species under the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy, there is currently no requirement for assessment or management at European level. Given increasing interest in targeting cephalopods in Europe...
In past centuries, the impacts on cephalopods from humankind were negligible. The first documented small-scale exploitation of cephalopods occurred in the Mediterranean and Asia. Between 1950-2019, global cephalopod catches increased by about an order of magnitude, from 0.5 million tones to a peak of 4.85 million tons. The human impact on the oceans also increased substantially in this period. Human-induced cli...
Changing oceans impact the whole marine ecosystem in different ways. For example, rising ocean temperatures can affect the presence / absence of species, especially when local environmental conditions exceed individual species’ physiological tolerances. Accordingly, climate change has caused shifts in distribution and expansions for various cephalopods worldwide. Cephalopods play an important role in the ecosys...
The use of cephalopod beaks in ecological and population dynamics studies has allowed major advances of our knowledge on the role of cephalopods in marine ecosystems in the last 60 years. Since the 1960’s, with the pioneering research by Malcolm Clarke and colleagues, cephalopod beaks (also named jaws or mandibles) have been described to species level and their measurements have been shown to be related to ceph...
There is an increasing demand for highly skilled workers in all advanced industrialised economies. Although most jobs require occupation-specific skills to carry them out, it is widely recognised that generic skills are ever more needed by job seekers, to increase job opportunities and maintain employability; this applies to all sectors of the economy, from selling cars to undertaking marine research. Several r...