The Sustainable Management of UK Marine Resources (SMMR) Network is excited to host another free Lunchtime Webinar!

This month Dr Neil Banas, Oceanographer and Mathematical Ecologist at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland, will give an insight into:

Precarious livelihoods in changing oceans: Salmon, sandeels, plankton, and people

Marine foragers from zooplankton to whales are, almost by definition, dependent on a patchwork of resources: often a shifting assemblage of species; patchy and unpredictable in space; seasonal or ephemeral in time. Life for a North Sea sandeel, in other words, subsisting on dimly seen patches of more than a dozen plankton species, is something like precarious employment or the gig economy: like a driver who relies on unpredictable calls from four taxi and food-delivery companies simultaneously.

“Precarity” and foraging lifeways are old subjects in ethnography and anthropology, and marine scientists might find inspiration in how contemporary scholars in the humanities like Anna Tsing (“The Mushroom at the End of the World”, 2015) link these conditions and strategies to the new world of the Anthropocene. In this talk I will sketch how Tsing’s work on precarity and problems of scale might change our perspective on climate-driven declines in the food chain supporting UK wild salmon and seabirds, suggest new quantitative modelling approaches, and call our attention to possible refugia and modes of resilience.

Register Here!