Algae: North Sea

(asked on 29th June 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, whether her Department has requested that the Natural History Museum to collect from specific incidences of algal blooms in the North Sea as part of its AlgaeVision database in (a) September 2021,(b) October 2021, (c) February 2022 and (d) April 2022.


Answered by
Nigel Huddleston Portrait
Nigel Huddleston
Financial Secretary (HM Treasury)
This question was answered on 6th July 2022

DCMS-sponsored museums operate at arm’s length from the Government. The specifics of projects are therefore operational matters for museums to decide independently.

The Natural History Museum has not been asked by the Government to collect any samples of algal blooms in the North Sea, nor would they have the required equipment to do so.

DCMS understands that the Algaevision project is a database and virtual collection of images of freshwater and terrestrial algae collected in Britain and Ireland. The project’s aim is to digitise the current algae species already in the Natural History Museum’s algae collection. Identifying the cause of crustacean deaths is outside the scope of the museum’s work and would be better directed to one of the marine monitoring research groups within the UK, such as the Scottish Association for Marine Science.

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