Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme (SMASS)
Marine mammal pathology: what can digitised data tell us about marine mammal health?
Sea-Changers' grant:
£500
Year:
2024
"Having the opportunity to be involved in this project was an amazing and unique learning experience... I was also trained as a SMASS volunteer, meaning I can continue contributing to marine mammal research and conservation beyond the project."
Each year, hundreds of marine mammals strand along the Scottish coast. The Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme (SMASS) has investigated these strandings since 1992, gathering data on over 15,000 events by carrying out post-mortem examinations and monitoring trends in disease, trauma and human impact.
Their Sea-Changers grant funded a student intern over the peak summer stranding period. The intern assisted with five post-mortems and supported digitisation of over 600 historical post-mortem reports, transforming decades of handwritten observations into a searchable dataset. This newly digitised resource is helping scientists spot long-term patterns in marine mammal health around Scotland.
Alongside training in pathology and bacteriology, the intern’s work fed into a University of Glasgow PhD research project. Findings were presented at a Society for Marine Mammalogy conference in Australia and are due to be published, having sparked valuable conversations among international stranding networks about the importance of digitising historic datasets. By sharing their approach and methods, SMASS is helping to shape how other countries preserve and analyse this critical information.
