Sea anemone birth

A beadlet anemone gave birth to a tiny baby sea anemone at the Brighton Science Festival during the drop in session I ran - rock pooling with a microscope.

This was a tiny replica of the adult - in fact it was created by a process called budding and is a clone of the original anemone.

In the video clip above you can see the size of the 'baby' anemone compared with the size of the adult.


While I collected the other rock pool animals from the beach for the drop in session, I have had the sea anemones for sometime in an aquarium at home. (see blog post below).


Anemones are often attached to a large rock or similar - so I have kept this one at home as it is attached to a pebble - so I always have one to take to schools etc. Sea anemones are also easy to keep in a cold water marine aquarium.

Brighton Science Festival

Its time again for the Brighton Science Festival and with friends of Shoreham Beach we set up our beach and ocean exhibit.

My exhibit looked at the local and the global. The global was represented by my One Ocean Project and a chance to share another of Ed the Bears real life adventures and also talk story about the many things he had learned and experienced during his global travels such as that 50% of the oxygen we breathe on land actually comes from phytoplankton in the ocean.

The ocean also moderates our climate and weather, provides fresh water and 15% of global food. New medicines are being discovered in the ocean and the ocean is also a great place for fun and wellbeing.

Sadly, the ocean is being damaged by many human activities such as plastic, climate change which is warming the ocean threatening marine life and also causing flooding. Ed the Bear has witnessed global threats first hand.

Man made carbon dioxide is also changing the chemistry of the ocean causing ocean acidification.


Shoreham Beach and the River Adur are currently suffering the local consequences of global sea level rise from climate change as the sea and river defences are being raised. As the oceans warm - the water expands taking up more space and so sea levels rise. Melting glaciers is also a major reason why sea levels are rising.

Ed the Bear has also encountered some amazing wildlife to. He has  sat with penguins on the polar ice, come nose to nose with great white sharks, dived on coral reef and shipwrecks and much more.

He has also observed the amazing wildlife we have on our on beaches in the UK - including the amazing local nature reserve on Shoreham Beach.

To show some of out own local marine life I ran two drop in workshops where we demonstrated some of the amazing animals that live in rock pools on Shoreham Beach.

An amazing thing happened, the sea anemone actually gave birth to a tiny baby sea anemone on the day.

In between the drop in sessions we ran a video showing some of the places I had visited and animals I have encountered.

This included penguins in Antarctica and South Africa, great white sharks off South Africa, humpback whales and Laysan albatross in the Hawaiian Islands, coral fish, turtles and much more.

Friends of Shoreham Beach had an amazing exhibit about the  rare shingle plants and the fascinating wildlife that lives on the beach. There was also a strandline quiz and a plastic pollution exhibit.


As usual it was a great day with lots of interest and excitement from the visitors.

Brighton Science Festival 2009

I attended the Brighton Science Festival again this year with a joint display with the Friends of Shoreham Beach Nature Reserve (FoSB). The Shoreham Beach Display included information about the Reserve and FoSB activities, events and achievements. A large part of the display was taken up by a marine litter display "Turning the Tide on marine Litter" and a display of marine litter including the time it takes for each item to biodegrade. (See below)

We shared the room with another display about creating art from marine litter.

My display focused on sea mammals again this year, particularly dolphins and seals, both of which have been recorded at Shoreham.

As well as UK and Sussex Cetaceans (Whales, Dolphins and Porpoise) the display included information about local seal sightings and a satellite tagging programme on Solent and South East Channel Seals.

I will be involved in this project as Sussex County Recorder for Sea Mammals and to develop an education pack to accompany the project. I hope to be able to provide updates on this project in future entries.

A major focal point for my display was the life sized inflatable bottlenose dolphin. This year I also ran three demonstrations in the demonstration hall, the scenario for the demonstration was a re-enactment of a dolphin rescue with audience participation.

Dolphins may be stranded for many reasons so I chose a different scenario for each demonstration, one of them being entangled in marine litter debris, which again linked to the FoSB display. About 100,000 marine mammals, seabirds and turtles are killed by debris each year.

Moving the dolphin from the display room to the demonstration room was a difficult operation, avoiding people and navigating along various narrow corridors.

The demonstration started with a introduction to dolphin adaptation and anatomy, as this is knowledge the audience would need to know to affect a rescue.

The demonstration followed the series of things one should do to help give first aid e.g. check it is breathing (how often!), keep it wet (dolphins can very quickly die of heat exhaustion), dig holes around the flippers if possible to alleviate the damage that gravity causes (dolphins can’t swim if they damage their flippers) and so on (see above)

The re-enactment also demonstrated how a dolphins adaptations to aquatic life work against them if they become stranded on land.

Being a demonstration involving children, each scenario has a happy ending. The dolphin was helped back into the sea and walked around until it was able to swim unaided. But in reality, even after much effort, a happy ending is not guaranteed.