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Greetings, less-than-full-strength salty dogs. Having had my conscience pricked by Marin to register with the list, I hope I don't cock up this first posting. Looking at the web page for this list, there have already been some very useful exchanges. I'm employed as the conservation advisor in the Head Office of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency but with sideline interests in estuarine nekton ecology, particularly in relation to the use of salt marshes, and estuarine protection/conservation policy, etc. As someone parochially involved in the Forth, I was interested in Marin's posting about Loligo in the Foth Estuary and checked some poorly-remembered memories with my father who was a countryside ranger on the East Lothian coastline for 20+ years. He has many records of loligids up to "2 feet" long (I guess that is not in SI units) stranding every year in late winter/ early spring, i.e. at the time of year when Marin's was discovered much further upstream in the same inlet. From the twitching and trembling of musculature, it would appear that some of the East Lothian strandings were still alive or only recently dead. Unfortunately, no more detailed taxonomic ID was undertaken but a phone call to the (then) mollusc people at the (then) Royal Scottish Museum (was it Sheila Smith ?) assured him they were probably "flying squid", an ID that hasn't proven easy to track down subsequently in any taxonomic source material ! Strandings in the outer Firth continue into early summer but with increasing rarity. My father reports that the loligids were brick-red on the upper surface and occasionally stranded in some numbers, a maximum of six large loligids turning up on one tide in Gosford Bay. He speculated that strong easterly winds might be responsible for this but we never went back and checked stranding records against the weather records. Don't you just love anecdotal science ?!? Sorry for the local nature of this - maybe a bit irrelevant to most of you but it gave me a good excuse to say hello. Looking forward to reading and writing... Scot mathieson %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%