Edinburgh Napier University

  Assessing and Protecting Spawning Herring and Associated Biodiversity: WOSHH-eDNA-Sound
Herring helped to generate local income, identity, and societal change for centuries in Scotland, but their numbers on the west coast have been in decline since the 1970s. Since 2018, large shoals of spring-spawning herring have been observed in West of Scotland inshore waters.
The two-year WOSHH-eDNA-Sound project will help detect if, when and where large spring-spawning herring shoals are present in West of Scotland inshore waters. The project will closely align, and create synergy, with the existing William Grant Foundation-funded “West of Scotland Herring Hunt” (WOSHH) project. Together, the projects will also seek to identify the benthic spawning habitat of herring to conserve and enhance it. Since herring use specific seabed habitat to deposit their eggs on, it is essential for population recovery that such areas are available when herring return to spawn. Healthy spawning habitat could help rebuild inshore herring populations. Restoring WoS herring populations would likely have significant positive knock-on effects for other species including other fish, seabirds and marine mammals that prey upon herring hence increase overall marine biodiversity, health, resilience, and productivity.
WOSHH-eDNA-Sound will team up with WoS communities to conduct field sampling. The project will analyse the environmental (e)DNA taken by WOSHH. WOSHH-eDNA-Sound will also take and analyse underwater recordings, by trialling to detect herring shoals by the sound they potentially produce, for the first time in Scottish waters.
WOSHH-eDNA-Sound, led by Edinburgh Napier University, is supported by the Scottish Government’s Nature Restoration Fund, managed by NatureScot.