Spreading the word about Orkney’s rare skate

A new leaflet has been published about one of Orkney’s rarest and most endangered animals – the flapper skate. This fish is now extinct around most of Europe’s shores – the waters around Orkney and the Hebrides are its main remaining strongholds. The decline in the population of this huge fish has been so severe that it is danger of global extinction, and it is ‘Red Listed’ as being even more threatened than the blue whale and the giant panda.

The leaflet promotes the newly-formed Orkney Skate Trust’s project to raise awareness about the species and to encourage anglers to join a ‘tag and release’ fishing scheme to help monitor and conserve the Orkney population.

The Orkney Skate Trust joined forces with the Scapa Flow Landscape Partnership Scheme to produce the leaflet which is part of a larger conservation project to monitor and conserve the Flapper skate.

Despite the flapper skate’s size – up to two metres in width from ‘wing tip to wing tip’ – their elusive nature means that little is known about the number of individuals in Orkney or their habits. The tag and release scheme aims to find out more. Fish are caught and tagged with a small dart tag before being safely released back to the sea. The long term aim is to build up a picture of the population by recording the location of tagged skate when they are re-caught.
Two successful ‘tag and release’ short courses for anglers were run during the summer, with a third planned for Summer 2011.

For more information about the Orkney Skate Trust and the work they are doing, please email mail@orkneyskatetrust.org.uk