Ben Harris

So this is an interesting kind of discussion that came out of the paper that

It's been over 10 years of protection.

And the only really signal that we saw in terms of biodiversity change was from the animals living in the seabed.

So these small worms and crustaceans and shell-building animals, snails and things like that, they are the kind of first rung of the ladder of recovery.

So it's a much slower rate of recovery that we'd expect from other areas in the ocean.

So a lot of other NPAs have been built around focus on fisheries, open water systems where recovery is quite quick.

Looking at these soft, sudden, muddy environments on the seabed, it looks like the kind of metabolic rate is much, much slower.

The recovery rate is much, much slower.

But it was nice to see that initial signal of these small critters living in the seabed recovering.

And as you say, it's likely that they're kind of facilitating over time other species then to come in and recover.

And eventually that will work its way up

the food chain, so we see recovery in fish stocks and things like that as well.

So as they sort of modify the sediment, they allow what we call epifauna, so that's stuff growing out of the sediment, things like sponges and corals, things like that that can grow out of the sediment.

facilitate those.

And then as you go further along in time, that will then bring in vertebrate communities, more lobsters, fish, things like that.

And then you move up the food chain that way.

So that is kind of what we call sort of an ecological succession.

And these are the real pioneering species that facilitate that succession over time.

Yeah, I mean, that is the message.

I think the important caveat here is that, as I mentioned before, time is a really, really big feature here and context.