Report of seminar participants
We are happy that two of our participants wrote a little summary about their experience during one of our TaMOs seminars. We believe that a summary of the presented seminar content is not only interesting to us.
Report of our TaMOS-Seminar from the 15th and 16th of March 2008
What is there to see in the Baltic anyway? Avid divers have to bother with this question all the time. But we just realised in the TaMOs seminar what we really see in front of our masks. Saturday and Sunday with 4 hours of lectures each were planed. This plan on one hand gave enough time for questions and discussions, but on the other hand the whole weekend was cut in pieces.
Day 1
At 10 o'clock we came together in a small group in one of the seminar rooms of the Leibniz-Institute of marine Science in Kiel. The chairman of this seminar Dirk Fleischer had all presentations and illustrative materials ready by this early hour and offered coffee and cookies to everyone. As an introduction Dirk presented the history and aims of TaMOs. Some people already know this from the TLV-SH instructor assembly a few weeks ago. We ourselfs were involved as guinea pigs in the tests of TaMOs. The evolution of TaMOs was the starter of this first day. The initiators of TaMOs Dirk Fleischer and Matthias Schaber had a hard time to convince officals from the environmental agency that lay people can and should be supported to environmental observations. But for several years there are projects in the Netherlands (ANEMOON) and the UK (MarLIN) which have good experience with volunteers. Now we have to ask ourselfs: "Are we fewer 'scientists' than our European collegues?" Dirk introduced us to the necessary methode and aims to assure comparable results. Good diving skills are a basic requirement for each participant, while it is not easy to handle the formular, the compass and actually look for animals and plants. It is not worth mentioning that all participants have a strong interest in marine biology.
When Dirk presented the quite tiny printed A4 underwater formulars some of us had doubts that we can deal with the large number of different plants and animals. In the next presentations Dirk explained methodical and in detail all the fields, sediments, anoxic areas, plant zones and finaly animal abundances. Detailed pictures were used to show us the specific charakteristics and during all these informations was always enough time for questions and talks. We realised that we already know quite a lot of species but we also had light bulb moments when we were enabled to identify so fare unknown species. Additional informations were also very intresting like the fact that goose barnacles have nothing in common like the omnipresent mussels. Based loosly on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: The diver finds underwater only what he already learned to know. A lot of species were available for further examination partly collected by Dirk along the beach and partly from formalin conserved samples. Fascinated we examined ancient looking pill bugs (Saduria entemon), alien alike Polychaets or the clutch of a whelk (Buccinum undatum). A database with all the taxonomic informations for all participants is coming soon to the internal area of the TaMOs website. This is to get rid of all the uncertainties during the field trip.
While Dirk did not want uns to be overstrained with the high density of information about macrophyts and crustaceans he broke up the tense presentations with all kinds of practical informations about the TaMOs method. For combarability it is necessary to follow a certain method, but as soon as the maximum depth is reached the dive can proceed as any normal fun dive. This has been done so by purpose to keep as much freedom and fun for the divers as possible.
Day 2
At the following sunday the seminar proceeded relaxed with coffee and cookies. The final animal species were introduced to us and especially the fishes were reason for discussions. For some of us were all flat fish automatically a "flounder", but Dirk showed us here all the characteristics in detail and now we know better. From the large number of questions it was obvious that the intrest in all these plants and animals increased and we scrutinised so fare unrecognised species. Dirk offered help and encouraged us to make pictures of everything and to send it to Matthias and Dirk if we have any problems with the identification. This a main feature in TaMOs and quite a lot of divers today have a underwater camera in their equipment. There is a slightly chance to be the first person documenting a new species in the Baltic. This is not so uncertain while the north american sea gooseberrie Mnemiopsis leidyi was introduced to the western Baltic in the summer of 2006. This species is now spreding the Baltic and can be found by any diver because of its huge abundance. Also a new species in the western Baltic is the red algae Gracilaria vermiculophylla, which was introduced to the Baltic in 2005 and spreaded from the Kiel fjord to the east. Connections like this are focused by TaMOs and can be done by divers who write down what they see underwater.
Besides the species richness of the Baltic we met other divers from different clubs with the same attitude. All wanted to start with the observation and wanted to support TaMOs by advertisments in their clubs. We can say that we became more aware of species and lay scientific activities by joining one of the TaMOs seminars. Anyway this seminar was for free and is supposed to be free in the future as well. The fact that Dirk Fleischer and Matthas Schaber sacrifice their weekends to show us more about the Baltic is sign for their commitment to the project. It was really fun. Unfortunatly the weather this weekend was stormy and the visability so low that we were not able to for our first observation dive.
M. Musinszki
H. Schweer
