This is a film about a group of people (fishermen, divers, members of the community and scientists) who worked together to survey the Wester Ross Marine Protected Area's seabed in June 2018. As citizen science it shows some of the unspoilt habitats as well as maerl both intact and damaged by dredgers as well as showing our attempts to document recover ( creating a baseline to monitor recovery). John McIntyre found a wonderful quote from 1376 complaining about chains being dragged over the seabed. ‘the great and long iron of the wondryechaun runs so heavily and hardly over the ground when fishing that it destroys the flowers of the land below water there, and also spat of oysters, mussels and other fish upon which the great fish are accustomed to be fed and nourished’. Whilst within Wester Ross MPA dredgers have been banned the impact of dragging metal over the seabed is still an impact and will be for many decades. However a lot must have changed in the sea if one considers what it might have been like before the industrial age. Because of the shifting baselines from generation to generation few of us can even imagine the abundance in the seas that our grandparents or great grandparents would have known. We hope to see it return in time.
