FRESH RESEARCH TO FOCUS ON THE SCOTTISH SHELLFISH INDUSTRY.

Fresh research to focus on the Scottish Shellfish industry. On-site environmental shellfish farm monitoring, assessing Blue mussel spat fall, and a deep dive into how social media trends can work for the shellfish industry.

Three grants have been awarded to early career researchers to focus on projects relevant to the Scottish shellfish industry’s priorities.

• Stirling University PhD student James Fennell is set to lead a collaboration including researchers from The Universities of Exeter and Edinburgh, and the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel on ‘Trends in Scottish Blue Mussel Spat Settlement for Aquaculture’. Scottish growers will be directly involved with an in-confidence assessment in the coming months.
• Drs Kati Michalek and Marja van den Houten from the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) will pilot a ‘Coastal Local Observations Connection Hub’ in a project devised with the help of a Durham University collaborator. This project will provide free environmental monitoring equipment to a small number of growers in western Scotland and develop a shared interactive platform that facilitates broad scale modelling and monitoring data sets for the coastal environment.
• Taking a different angle to support industry needs, a collaboration between researchers from Bangor University, The University of Aberdeen and University College Cork will look at how social media, including TikTok and Instagram, can effectively leverage trends and promote shellfish to different age profile audiences. This will complement existing work being led by Kelly Wright the Scottish Cultivated Shellfish Ambassador.

The projects, arising from collaborations formed at an early career shellfish researcher workshop in Oban last November, have been developed to reflect the priorities identified in a shellfish grower survey conducted by the Roslin Institute, part of the University of Edinburgh, ahead of the workshop.

This is the first time that this initiative has run, with a total sum awarded across the three projects of £15,000. Given the overwhelming positive response, with the workshop oversubscribed and interest from as far away as Germany and the USA, it is hoped that the exercise will be repeated in 2025 with support from the Research Councils, potentially unlocking more substantial, longer-term funding to continue relevant industry shaped research.

Tim Bean, research group leader at The Roslin Institute, the University of Edinburgh, said:

“We are really happy to have been able to deliver this workshop in partnership with the Association of Scottish Shellfish Growers and Fishmongers’ Company, and to see these industry-relevant projects come out of this demonstrates just how much potential there is for genuine collaboration between industry and the research community.”

Nick Lake, CEO of the ASSG said:

“Our growers have a vast practical knowledge of the marine environment upon which we all depend to maintain both wild and cultivated shellfish stocks. Having the academic community engage in discussions and consider our priorities is a real positive development which pairs the researchers’ skills with the expertise and long-term observations of our producer businesses. Devising projects that can generate new knowledge useful for us all is a really great outcome. We know that there will be emerging challenges arising from the impact of climate change on the coastal environment, and developing innovative remedial solutions based on scientific evidence is something the industry excels at. I look forward to assisting all three research projects and bringing the research leads back to our October 2025 meeting in Oban to share results with the industry.”

Eleanor Adamson from the Fishmongers’ Company’s Fisheries Charitable Trust, which funded the initiative, said:

“It is really exciting to see rising academic stars engage so positively with industry priorities, and I hope that the small projects here will spark close ongoing collaboration for the benefit of the seafood sector and marine environment.”

Results of all three projects will be presented in person at this year’s annual ASSG conference on 1^st and 2^nd October 2025 in Oban, registration opens in early August with full details on the website – www.assg.org.uk