Lough Hyne is located on the South West coast of Ireland, about an hour an a half drive from Cork. Here in the Department of Zoology, Ecology and Plant Sciences we have three marine laboratories located at the Lough. These labs are the Renouf lab, the Bohane lab and the Kitching lab (pictured below). Research has been ongoing at Lough Hyne since the mid 1930s and a wealth of information is available detailing the trophic ecology of the Lough. This means that there is a considerable amount of baseline data available to develop a Lough Hyne food web. Working at Lough Hyne is also great because it is extremely sheltered so whilst it might be blowing a gale on the open coast we can work very easily in the lough itself.

Bohane Lab

Bohane Lab

Kitching Lab

Lough Hyne is essentially a giant rock pool, where we can explore ecological theory. Specifically, in the context of species loss - how does the loss of species from multiple trophic levels affect ecosystem functioning? The food web opposite (put together from published and unpublished work at Lough Hyne) illustrates how some species are highly connected in the web. We can begin to ask how ecosystem processes would be affected by the loss of such species. We can achieve this using body size to estimate the strength of trophic interactions in the system (Emmerson and Raffaelli 2004).

Using this approach to parameterise food web models does require that we have detailed information on body sizes, abundances and food web structure (Joel Cohen's trivariate food web data structure). Both Eoin O'Gorman and Nessa O'Connor are working on aspects of the Lough Hyne Food web. Another of our ongoing projects achieved with the help of undergraduate students is the study of the fish community of Lough Hyne. The above food web features just ten fish whose diet at Lough Hyne is documented in the literature, in fact, there are 76 species of fish documented within the Lough and so we have been carrying out a series of seine netting surveys within the lough to characterise the fish community and how they contribute to the Lough Hyne food web.

Lough Hyne is Europe's first marine nature reserve and so we have to be sensitive when surveying for fish and examining their diets. We use a gut flushing technique to lavage the stomach of the fish and obtain the gut contents.

There are clear size structures within populations (as for littorina on the left) and between species see the group of predatory crabs on the right (from top to bottom: Cancer pagurus, Necora puber, Carcinus maenas and Liocarcinus arcuatus)