With the exception of several studies carried out in Portugal and some theses and individual papers published in Galicia and Asturias, the barnacle has never been the subject of a comprehensive study… until now. Researchers from Spain, France and Portugal will work until 2020 on the European project Percebes, Tools for the transition to spatial management of coastal: the stalked barnacle fishery in SW Europe, with the aim of developing tools to predict the implications of different spatial management options on the local productivity of the banks of this crustacean, as well as the associated biodiversity and connectivity between subpopulations in Europe, specifically in French Brittany. Asturias, Galicia and the Algarve. “The barnacle fishery is a perfect case study for the exploration of new management tools and their interaction with biodiversity, since their extraction, by scraping the rock, affects the structure of the intertidal community,” explains Gonzalo Macho, coordinator of the team from the University of Vigo that participates in the project, led by the University of Oviedo, and completed by professors Elsa Vázquez and Paloma Morán, researchers Esther Pérez and Jorge Pascual, all from the Ecocost group; as well as researchers Elena Ojea and Alba Aguión (FPU fellow) from Future Oceans Lab.
CIM-UVigo team. From left to right: Alba Aguión, Gonzalo Macho, Elena Ojea, Elsa Vázquez, Jorge Pascual and Esther Pérez
Biologists from the fishermen’s associations and the Ministry of the Sea, who will ensure that the research covers the needs that exist for fisheries management, and NGOs such as WWF-Spain, which will work to disseminate and stimulate the participation of the sector, join the team of almost 30 researchers from six institutions, led by the University of Oviedo (IP of the project) and which are joined, in addition to the University of Vigo, the Graduate and Postgraduate Engineering School and Research Institute and the Pierre and Marie Curie University of France and the universities of Aveiro and Évora of Portugal.
An unknown economic resource
The research project, which is being developed in a context of climate change in which it will study how physical variables, especially temperature and outcrops, will impact the biology and ecology of barnacles, will allow us to delve deeper into “a very important economic resource about which many things are unknown, for example how temperature will affect it, or how it grows”, points out Gonzalo Macho, who also emphasizes that exploitation throughout Europe is carried out with very different management models, which allows us to compare and search for the systems or measures that are most successful.
Regarding the situation of the resource in Galicia, Macho explains that “it has its problems, but in general it is good, at least the discharges in recent years are more or less stable. But there is no detailed analysis of the state of the resource, what researchers call stock assessment”. The location of the barnacles in very exposed areas and in crevices makes it difficult to study this organism and requires the use of tools based on life cycle parameters and data that come from the fishery itself. “The barnacle fishermen always say that we biologists study the barnacle ‘behind the barrier’, like bulls, and they are largely right, we cannot apply our methodologies in many of the areas where they work and those areas are really the ones that give the best barnacles”, explains the coordinator of the project at the University of Vigo, who highlights that the problem, for now, in applying this method is that the age of the barnacle is unknown and knowing the size-age relationship is fundamental, although this aspect will not be addressed in this project.
Installation of cages in various points on the Galician coast
As has already happened in several points on the coast of the countries participating in the European project, in Galicia cages were also installed for the study, specifically in Baiona, Cabo Home-Cangas and A Coruña-Torre de Hércules. “The installation of the cages was possible thanks to the collaboration of the Technical Assistance of the guilds (ATs), local barnacle fishermen and biologists from the Ministry of the Sea, who not only helped in the selection of areas, but also in their placement”, explains Gonzalo Macho, for whom research carried out in a participatory manner with the sector and fisheries administration or civil organisations is the way to do this type of work, so that the research resolves real needs of the sector and that the results are applied in management. In addition to the study of the reproductive and recruitment cycle, the research staff of the University of Vigo will take part in the remaining activities of the project such as the experiment to measure the capacity of the ecosystem to return to its initial state after the extraction of the barnacle; the genetic and epigenetic studies and the bioeconomic model.
Source: Duvi
