{"id":58843,"date":"2025-08-10T09:37:04","date_gmt":"2025-08-10T09:37:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/58843\/"},"modified":"2025-08-10T09:37:04","modified_gmt":"2025-08-10T09:37:04","slug":"volunteers-find-18000-shark-egg-cases-on-beaches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/58843\/","title":{"rendered":"Volunteers find 18,000 shark egg cases on beaches"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ollie Samuels<\/p>\n

BBC News, Lancashire<\/p>\n

\"MikeMike McDonnell<\/p>\n

Egg cases, including rays and catsharks, wash up at Morecambe Bay<\/p>\n

Volunteers who survey shark eggs in Morecambe Bay counted nearly 18,000 egg cases last year.<\/p>\n

Lancashire Wildlife Trust’s The Bay Group have earned a national award for the findings, being recognised at the Marsh Volunteer Awards for Marine Conservation.<\/p>\n

The volunteers search for old egg cases on the shoreline, take photographs of them, and upload them to the Shark Trust’s website.<\/p>\n

Alan Wright from Lancashire Wildlife Trust said: “I don’t think people realise what we’ve got in the Irish Sea. We’ve got things like dolphins, porpoises, giant basking sharks, humpback whales.”<\/p>\n

“The Irish Sea is such an important place and we really need to protect it,” he told BBC Radio Lancashire<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The cases protect the embryos of sharks and skates as they develop. Once empty, they often wash up on beaches.<\/p>\n

\"KK Tyler<\/p>\n

The cases are compared against charts to categorise them.<\/p>\n

The Morecambe Bay group found 30% of all egg cases across the UK last year.<\/p>\n

The cases are rehydrated, categorised and counted – which helps scientists understand the population make up of our oceans.<\/p>\n

The data showed that the small-spotted catshark and the thornback ray were the most commonly found by the group.<\/p>\n

\"MikeMike McDonnell<\/p>\n

Volunteers go on the hunt for shark egg shells.<\/p>\n

Rachel Glascott from the Bay Group said it was “great for [volunteers] to be recognised for the work that they do”.<\/p>\n

The Bay shared the Marsh Volunteer Award with Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust’s beach clean volunteers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ollie Samuels BBC News, Lancashire Mike McDonnell Egg cases, including rays and catsharks, wash up at Morecambe Bay…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58844,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-58843","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}