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Lough Hyne is a marine inlet in Ireland fed by tidal currents from the Atlantic Ocean. The lough is one of the first protected marine waters in Europe, but over the years, development, pollution, and overuse has degraded the natural environment. Video by Grant Callegari.

The birthplace of experimental marine biology is in decline. Will Ireland rally to save it?


Jeweler’s loupe in hand, Colin Little hunches over a cluster of rocks on the shoreline, scanning for barnacles and limpets. His wife, Penny Stirling, calf-deep in the shallows, plucks a rock from the water, surveys its underside, and replaces it dolefully. “Not a trotus in sight,” she says. She’s referring to Paracentrotus lividus, the purple sea urchin, which, until the year 2000, dominated these waters but is now virtually absent. “They used to be everywhere,” she says—sometimes so dense near the shore that you couldn’t avoid stepping on them. “Now you just find them under the occasional boulder.”

Little and Stirling see the urchin’s decline as a symptom of larger changes afoot in Lough Hyne, a tiny, sparkling sea enclave on Ireland’s southwest coast. Little began visiting the lough—Irish Gaelic for lake—in 1979, when he was a marine biologist at the University of Bristol in England. Stirling, an electron microscopist, joined him for summer fieldwork the following year. The couple have faithfully visited the area almost every year since. During their first decade at the lough, Little was researching how limpets—a type of grazing sea snail—move and forage on the seashore. But in 1990, around the time both Little and Stirling retired, they began to monitor marine life along the lough’s shores at their own expense, creating a unique timeline of long-term changes in the communities that live there. Late each summer, they traveled from their home in the English countryside to count marine life at spots first surveyed in 1955—a baseline against which to compare the changes they witnessed. When possible, they recruited Little’s former students and other experts as volunteers to support the work, from as far afield as Hong Kong and New Caledonia.


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Colin Little, formerly a marine biologist at the University of Bristol in England, has spent his retirement tracking biodiversity declines on Lough Hyne’s shores with his wife, Penny Stirling, formerly an electron microscopist. Image courtesy of Colin Little and Penny Stirling.

I’ve joined the couple on a crisp, sunny day in September of 2023 to help them survey a section of the shore at a spot called Castle Island. A grassy mound in the midst of the lough, Castle Island is named after a fortress that once towered over these waters. The ivy-drenched ruins of the castle now barely protrude above the island’s scrubby terrain. The day is bittersweet for the octogenarians. They’ve decided this trip will be their last, and no one has yet stepped up to continue their unfunded work. They are burdened not only with the end of their valuable data set but with the end of the lough as they once knew it.

“It’s been a gradual decline in all sorts of things over decades. … The north shore is basically dead now,” says Little, referring to the lough’s shallowest and most accessible portion. “If you look back at 1990, or particularly if you go back to 1955, there were stacks of things like common starfish”—but those are largely gone. Top shells—a type of conical sea snail—and spiny starfish are among the other species that have vanished. And without the urchins to graze the lough’s shallows, in warm weather, soft, dense mats of filamentous algae—or “scunge” as Little and Stirling call it—blanket everything. The scunge likely signals a surfeit of nutrient pollution, which leads to murky water and insufficient oxygen to sustain marine life.


A Lough Hyne without urchins is an ocean inlet with soft, dense mats of filamentous algae, also known as “scunge,” which is likely a result of nutrient pollution leading to a loss of oxygen necessary for marine life to thrive. Image by Grant Callegari. Ireland, 2024.

Once, though, the lough was so flush with living things that renowned Irish naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger described it as “a gigantic marine aquarium”—an ocean within the ocean. Created 4,000 years ago when the Atlantic breached a freshwater lake, the lough remains connected to the wider ocean through a narrow, roaring channel called “the rapids,” and contains a surprising array of habitats in its less than one-square-kilometer area. Among these are tidal marshes, rocky shores, seagrass meadows, beaches, and steep underwater cliffs. These have supported a huge variety of species, some rare in Irish waters, including a red-mouthed goby fish; sponges painted in a dizzying array of saffron, terracotta, and tangerine hues; and a cup coral, in vibrant peach, found nowhere else in Ireland. More common life forms, including three-quarters of the marine algae species recorded in Ireland, have also been found here.

The lough’s diversity of life, small size, and sheltered, accessible location made it an important research site for marine scientists as far back as 1923. It was an ideal model system for understanding the wider ocean, and in the decades that followed, it became the birthplace of experimental marine biology. For these and other reasons, the Irish government designated Lough Hyne as the nation’s—and Europe’s—first statutory marine reserve in 1981. A local fisherman took on the role of warden and successfully managed the site. “It was an extremely quiet place. … There was never anyone there,” says Declan O’Donnell, a district conservation officer for Ireland’s National Parks and Wildlife Service, the agency responsible for the lough.





Lough Hyne is connected to the Atlantic Ocean by a narrow channel called “the rapids.” Video by Grant Callegari. Ireland, 2024.

But much has changed since then, and management has not kept pace. Although the Cork region, where the lough is located, has been a dairy farming heartland since the 19th century, in recent decades agriculture there has massively intensified. Cork now boasts around 450,000 dairy cattle, spread over several thousand farms, each of which leaches nitrogen from manure into local waterways, polluting Ireland’s southwest coast. More recently, Lough Hyne has become one of Ireland’s most popular water-sports destinations, drawing large crowds of people to swim, kayak, and picnic. This has worsened other problems, including poaching of edible marine species and littering.

Linking the lough’s decline to any of these factors is difficult. National Parks no longer has a ranger regularly on site and has not routinely monitored environmental conditions. Meanwhile, Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which oversees national water quality, does not include Lough Hyne among the sites that it routinely monitors.

But much has changed since then, and management has not kept pace. Although the Cork region, where the lough is located, has been a dairy farming heartland since the 19th century, in recent decades agriculture there has massively intensified. Cork now boasts around 450,000 dairy cattle, spread over several thousand farms, each of which leaches nitrogen from manure into local waterways, polluting Ireland’s southwest coast. More recently, Lough Hyne has become one of Ireland’s most popular water-sports destinations, drawing large crowds of people to swim, kayak, and picnic. This has worsened other problems, including poaching of edible marine species and littering.

Linking the lough’s decline to any of these factors is difficult. National Parks no longer has a ranger regularly on site and has not routinely monitored environmental conditions. Meanwhile, Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which oversees national water quality, does not include Lough Hyne among the sites that it routinely monitors.


Lough Hyne from different viewpoints. Satellite image from Google Earth

Images by Grant Callegari. Ireland, 2024.

The situation at the reserve is part of a trend in Ireland and globally: “paper parks”—whereby governments create protected areas but fall flat on developing regulations or on enforcing them. Worldwide, there are nearly 19,000 marine protected areas; over 30 percent of their total area lacks meaningful rules and regulations. Ireland currently has 254 protected sites that are wholly or partially marine; few have management plans. In a recent survey by international NGOs Oceana and Seas At Risk that ranked ocean conservation measures among seven European Union member states, Ireland tied for last place because it has so few marine protected areas, and because the protections it affords those sites are thin.

Ireland may be bad, but the problem extends across Europe. “Over the last 20 years … there was a race to designation,” says Nicolas Fournier, campaign director at Oceana Europe. But “most of the marine species and habitats, if you look at their conservation status, it’s still degrading. … We’ve expanded marine protected areas without any management.”


Video by Grant Callegari. Ireland, 2024.

II

Located in the prosperous district of West Cork on Ireland’s southwest coast, Lough Hyne is nestled between the quaint fishing village of Baltimore and the bustling market town of Skibbereen. The region is renowned for its artisanal food, its arty vibe, and the raw beauty of its cliffy coastline.

From the main Baltimore Road, the route to Lough Hyne is steep, winding, and unnervingly narrow, bound on either side by dense shrubbery. At the end of this serpentine stretch emerges an expansive vista, which—to the uninitiated—can come as a surprise. Afforded a sleepy tranquility by its sheltered position along a storm-battered coast, the lough is on most days as smooth as glass, its surface breathtakingly reflective.


Louis Renouf, chair of zoology at University College Cork in Ireland, was the first of what would become generations of marine researchers to fall in love with and do groundbreaking work at Lough Hyne. Image courtesy of Terri Kearney/Lough Hyne: the Marine Researchers.

Though the visitors who come here in droves each summer are mostly in pursuit of leisure, they also come to marvel at the lough’s storied bioluminescence. The water shimmers on warm nights as though filled with spinning sequins—its spangled darkness a close double of the starry sky above. These pyrotechnics are the work of a single-celled creature, Noctiluca scintillans, which is neither plant nor animal. Its common name is sea sparkle, though on Cape Clear, an island 20 kilometers southwest of Lough Hyne, locals call it crois na farraige, which in Irish Gaelic means “embers of the sea.”

Bioluminescent plankton may be the most conspicuous creatures in Lough Hyne, but it was the lough’s more hidden life forms that initially drew scientists to this place a century ago. The first of these pilgrims was Louis Renouf, professor of zoology at nearby University College Cork, whose inaugural visit took place one stormy day in February 1923 when he was 35 years old. From that moment, he was consumed with a single-minded mission to study the lough, and “remained beneath its spell for the rest of his life,” writes ecologist and author Trevor Norton in his memoir of Lough Hyne, Reflections on a Summer Sea. Renouf built a makeshift hut from which he could easily access and survey the lough’s waters; in his first five years there, he identified 1,500 species.

Word of his fixation spread and, before long, academics began to travel from abroad to marvel alongside him. Among those visitors was Jack Kitching, who arrived from England in the late 1930s. Kitching eventually took over from Renouf, purchasing land and financing two research facilities close to Renouf’s hut, which by then had evolved into the lough’s first research laboratory. Together, these buildings formed a base that enabled decades of research, mostly by British biologists and their army of student helpers, who spent long summers camping on the lough’s shores.


Jack Kitching, an adventurous scientist who was the first to dive in British waters, took over from Renouf and expanded research facilities at Lough Hyne. Image courtesy of Terri Kearney/Lough Hyne: the Marine Researchers. Ireland.

Like Renouf, Kitching had an adventurous spirit. In the 1930s, he became the first scientist to dive in British waters, using an apparatus he constructed from a milk churn with a glass window and a garden hose for air. During the Second World War, he devised and personally tested a cold-water immersion suit for pilots forced to ditch at sea, a feat that earned him special recognition from British King George VI. By 1948, he was using his improvised diving kit to explore the depths of Lough Hyne.

Kitching looked like a shipwrecked mariner—favoring torn, disheveled clothes—and he resisted creature comforts, adhered to a strict work program, and often put in long hours. “He would be very supportive of what people were doing. But he would expect them to live and work according to his standards of behavior,” says Simon Thrush, Kitching’s last PhD candidate, now the Director of the Institute of Marine Science at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand.

Kitching carried out much of his research with one of his former students, John Ebling. Ebling was renowned for his ribald humor—which rankled Kitching—and for his insatiable appetite for hearty food and Guinness, which he ensured were in plentiful supply at camp. For the students who spent their summers under Kitching’s close watch, Ebling’s presence made the experience rapturous.

Despite their differences, Kitching and Ebling collaborated for 40 years on a series of trailblazing experiments that built on Renouf’s unpublished work to demonstrate how certain species could influence and even shape ecosystems. First, they toyed with the common mussel, which dominated the lough’s quietest corners and surf-battered shorelines but were virtually absent from the lough’s other quarters. Mussels that they relocated within the lough to shores that were neither exposed nor entirely sheltered were soon devoured by the crabs and starfish common in such areas. A similar experiment with dog whelks—a species of sea snail—confirmed that crabs excluded them from most areas. The scientists also identified the purple sea urchin as the lough’s most important grazer—a munching machine that could swiftly strip the rocks of algae.


John Ebling, one of Kitching’s students, became a steady research collaborator, and the pair conducted a series of experiments that laid early groundwork for the ecological concept of keystone species. Image courtesy of Terri Kearney/Lough Hyne: the Marine Researchers.

Scientists elsewhere had been manipulating barnacles, limpets, and algae on rocky shores and observing the effects since the 1930s, but Kitching and Ebling’s experimental work at Lough Hyne, first published in 1959, expanded this approach to an entire ecosystem. “What Jack [Kitching] did was to tease apart the system and figure out how it worked. … It was definitely pioneering,” says Thrush. It also helped pave the way for similar experiments elsewhere, which eventually led American ecologist Robert Paine, in 1966, to coin the concept of “keystone species.” The idea, now taught to every budding ecologist as a central tenet of the field, describes those species whose presence structures the larger community, determining what else survives and thrives.

Kitching and Ebling’s work also persuaded others of Lough Hyne’s value, including my guide, Colin Little, and many of his students. Among them was Gray Williams, who had a formative experience at Lough Hyne as Little’s PhD candidate in the 1980s and now directs the Swire Institute of Marine Science at the University of Hong Kong. “It was a really big deal,” says Williams, “… stepping into that rich history.”


Video by Grant Callegari. Ireland, 2024.

III

Back at Castle Island, it is low tide, the cue for Stirling and Little to begin their survey. Stirling wades in until the water reaches halfway up a meter stick that she carries for this purpose, marking the boundary at which her and Little’s observations end. She hands me a waterproof paper data sheet, used to record estimates of species counts for each survey location. The couple visit over 100 yellow crosses and about 40 squares painted on rocks around the lough; they use these to gauge their position on the shoreline and the start and end of each monitoring site. The crosses represent sections of the shoreline delineated in the early 1920s by Renouf when he first surveyed its nearshore creatures. Stirling and Little painted the squares later, in 1990, marking new sites.

At each monitoring site, the couple randomly throw down a quadrat measuring 50 centimeters by 50 centimeters, then record all plants and animals they find inside. They measure any urchins, now a rarity, with calipers. “We used to leave a lot of space [on the paper] for measuring the trotus. We needed such a lot of people to count and record them. If you saw a sea urchin, you’d say ‘trotus’ and you’d scream,” Stirling says, explaining that this “bright purple treasure” was “always an exciting find.” It’s much quieter now—there are fewer volunteers and fewer screams—and we find no purple treasure at this site. I pop a zero in the section marked “trotus,” and we move on.


Penny Stirling, Colin Little, and a collaborator survey the lough’s shores during their final season. Image courtesy of Colin Little and Penny Stirling. Ireland.

Common to the Mediterranean Sea and Northeast Atlantic, the purple sea urchin Paracentrotus lividus inhabits shallow waters, and in Lough Hyne it is typically found down to a depth of five meters. In 2002, an American ecologist from the University of Oregon, Cynthia Trowbridge, began working alongside Little and Stirling to survey urchins and other creatures at the lough. Snorkeling along its shoreline every summer, she extended the survey’s reach beyond the shallows into water several meters deep—capturing the full spread of the urchins’ local habitat—and built a meticulous photographic record of the marine life she saw below. Even as Trowbridge extended the survey area for urchins, however, the count declined. Combined, the data collected by Trowbridge, Little, Stirling, and others suggests that the local urchin population was healthy until around 2000. After that, it dropped precipitously.

The purple sea urchin, Paracentrotus lividus, was a dominant species in Lough Hyne until 2000. Its population in the lough has seen a precipitous decline in the past 24 years. Chart by Mark Garrison, with data from Trowbridge et al.

Trowbridge, whose research at the lough has been partly self-funded, has recorded other losses. Mussels and grazing sea snails called topshells, once abundant, are now largely absent, while other species, most notably sargassum seaweed—which is highly invasive—have arrived. “How has it changed in the time that I’ve been there? It’s dramatic,” says Trowbridge, who last visited the lough in 2019 and plans to return in 2025. She calls the decline of marine life in the lough’s shallows “a disaster.”

The absence of the urchin, as a keystone species, has had the most notable effect. Because urchins graze on algae, their demise has allowed the scunge to spread and grow. It’s possible that the steep drop in urchin numbers is part of a boom-bust cycle, spurred by disease or recent ocean warming. Throughout their range, purple urchins often die en masse with little warning. In the lough, their population fluctuated tenfold from year to year before their decline. But their disappearance, together with that of other creatures, makes Trowbridge think there’s more at play.


Rob McAllen, professor of marine biology at University College Cork, holds a purple sea urchin, Paracentrotus lividus, at Lough Hyne. Image by Grant Callegari. Ireland, 2024.

An extra dose of nutrients—such as the nitrogen and phosphorus in fertilizers leaching into the water from farms—can make algae spread like wildfire. When the algae die, they become food for bacteria, which in great enough number can deplete the water of oxygen. Once the oxygen level is low enough, specialist bacteria that thrive in these conditions take over and break down sulfur-containing proteins within the algae, releasing hydrogen sulfide gas. It was while searching for urchins in 2012 with a group of students that Trowbridge first noticed the smell of rotten eggs oozing from beneath submerged boulders. She instantly recognized the odor as hydrogen sulfide, which can be poisonous to both humans and wildlife. At the same time, Trowbridge documented wildly variable oxygen levels in Lough Hyne, both below and above normal, a sure sign that algae were blooming, producing extra oxygen at the surface by day while their decomposition created hypoxia, or oxygen deficiency, deeper down in the water. These conditions, she says, are “totally unacceptable for the majority of invertebrates.” If eutrophication and algal growth are causing the decline of urchins, it’s a vicious cycle: without urchins, more algae grow.

Deeper in the lough, other species have also declined. For most of the time that anyone has been looking, dense gardens of up to 100 varied, colorful species of sponges covered the lough’s vertical underwater cliffs. Then, in 2016, marine biologists Rob McAllen, of University College Cork, and James Bell, of Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, discovered during a dive that large patches of the cliff face were bare. At some point since 2000, half the sponges had vanished. The worst hit were large, branching individuals. Like the old trees in a forest, these large sponges provide vital habitat, a refuge for other creatures.

McAllen and Bell and their coauthors attribute the sponge decline to changes in the oxygen and temperature profiles of the water, most likely during one or two specific events between 2010 and 2015. These deeper-water losses may have different causes than the losses in the shallows, says McAllen, though pinpointing the culprit is difficult. There isn’t enough long-term data. Since 2019, National Parks has helped fund the researchers to study the impacted cliffs. There has been some, though limited, recovery.


A deep-water sponge in Lough Hyne acts as an efficient pump, as demonstrated using a green fluorescent dye. In pumping large volumes of water through their bodies, sponges filter out tiny particles as food. Image by Grant Callegari. Ireland, 2024.


In conversation, McAllen is careful to emphasize that the lough is not a wasteland. Deeper pockets of the lough remain rich in biodiversity, and many of the site’s most iconic characters—from red-mouthed goby fish to meter-long lobsters—are still abundant, he says. But the shallow subtidal waters have seen a “massive extinction event. It is very depauperate in relation to what it was like.”

Concerned for the lough’s future, in 2021, a team of international experts including McAllen, Bell, Little, and Trowbridge came together to warn about its likely fate. Writing in a book entitled Imperiled: The Encyclopedia of Conservation, they charted the lough’s history from its ancient birth to its recent decline. Like a sick patient, the marine reserve requires a detailed care plan, they argued. Otherwise, more widespread losses are inevitable.

IV

When Lough Hyne was established as Europe’s first marine reserve in 1981, the Irish government introduced a few rules to govern the site. Permits were required for anyone, including researchers, wanting to dive, to use powerboats, or to remove or introduce wildlife. Dumping was prohibited. At the time, enforcing these rules was relatively easy. The Bohanes, two brothers whose homes overlooked the lough, had already taken on the role of informal guardians. One of the brothers, John, had been helping the scientists who worked at the lough for decades, acting as a supplier of materials, a builder, and occasionally, a skipper.

“They were local fishermen and farmers. And they had a very keen interest in making sure that people behaved and abided by the regulations,” recalls Declan O’Donnell from National Parks. After the park’s designation, John Bohane was assigned as the lough’s de facto warden and was allowed to continue pot-fishing for prawns on a seasonal basis. Visitors were allowed to continue catch-and-release angling for mackerel, mullet, and other fish. As warden, Bohane was a constant presence who relished talking to people, explaining the rules, and making sure that nothing was awry. At the time, Ireland had no dedicated nature conservation agency, so it made sense for a conscientious local to oversee activity.

The Irish government also assigned a ranger—covering forests and fisheries—to West Cork in 1984, but with such a large area to cover, he rarely made it to Lough Hyne, so Bohane continued as before. In 1998, the site gained another designation as a Special Area of Conservation under the Habitats Directive, an EU law aimed at maintaining priority habitats and species and restoring them when they are in decline. The designation included not just the lough but nearby heathlands, wetlands, and a mountainous nature reserve called Knockomagh Hill, which overlooks the lough’s north shore. In practice, little else changed at the lough. Bohane stayed there as warden until about two years before his death, in 2007.


A local fisherman named John Bohane became the lough’s de facto warden after it was designated a marine reserve in 1981, and stayed in that role until a couple of years before he died, in 2007. Image courtesy of Terri Kearney/Lough Hyne: the Marine Researchers.

By that point, pressures on the lough were mounting. Nutrient pollution, mostly from agricultural runoff, had begun to show up along Ireland’s southwest coast. Polluted water could, in theory, run off from surrounding farms directly into the lough. But it can also easily enter the lough through the rapids, and because the lough has asymmetric tides, filling twice as fast as it drains, pollution reaches higher concentrations there than it does in the open ocean. The Irish EPA is required to survey a representative sample of waterbodies each year. Though Lough Hyne, Ireland’s only statutory marine reserve, isn’t on that list, the agency briefly funded sampling there from 2007 to 2013. The research revealed a great increase in nitrate in 2008–09 compared with 1992–93. Sampling within the lough has since been rare and unreliable, much to scientists’ disappointment. The EPA acknowledges, however, that nutrient pollution has worsened along Ireland’s south coast, where the lough is located.

That’s likely due to an intensification of dairy farming, and in particular to the abolition in 2015 of a European policy that had capped the amount of milk that individual farmers could produce each year. In West Cork, cattle herds grew, as did the amount of waste slurry that farmers applied as fertilizer to fields. Unlike manure, slurry is liquid and easily runs off into rivers, streams, and coastal waters.

Over the past decade, the lough has also seen a dramatic increase in visitors owing to government-led initiatives to increase tourism in rural Ireland. The first of these came in 2014 when the Department of Tourism and Sport launched the Wild Atlantic Way, Ireland’s premier long-distance touring route. Stretching 2,500 kilometers from Donegal in the north of Ireland to Kinsale in the south, the circuit consists of 157 “discovery points,” including Lough Hyne. In 2023, the national tourism body, Fáilte Ireland, listed Lough Hyne as the fourth-best swimming spot in the country, encouraging more day trippers.


Numerous pressures have mounted at the lough since its designation as a marine reserve, from farm-related nutrient pollution to a swell of recreational users like these sea kayakers. Image by Grant Callegari. Ireland, 2024.

Though nobody has tallied the numbers, Stirling says the “car park”—a small pullout next to the reserve, where visitors leave their vehicles and get changed for swimming—is often overcrowded. Some visitors trample the seabed and harm marine life, dump their rubbish on the shore, and often wear standard sunscreen that isn’t reef-safe—which, when it washes off in the water, impairs early development of the purple sea urchin.

Faced with these challenges, National Parks has made some attempts to improve management at Lough Hyne, but experts say the changes have been too slow and too few. In 2014, for example, the agency announced conservation objectives for the site, a legal requirement under the Habitats Directive. But it offered no plan for implementing them and didn’t have the resources to do so. At the time, the agency operated with a skeleton staff and was chronically underfunded, rendering it incapable of adequately protecting many of its parks. Throughout Ireland’s nature reserves, biodiversity was in free fall. The situation was so severe that in 2016 the European Commission accused Ireland of failing to protect 217 of 423 sites in need of conservation—a charge for which the Court of Justice of the European Union ultimately found the country guilty.

In 2020, Lough Hyne’s prospects theoretically improved when Irish voters elected the Green Party as part of a coalition government, ending a decade of strategic underfunding of National Parks. The following year, the new leadership agreed to broader protections for Lough Hyne, transposing the EU Special Area of Conservation designation into Irish law and increasing the list of activities at the lough that require permits. National Parks now regulates organized recreational activities, such as kayaking, and tries to limit the number of permits for activities. In some cases, it refuses them entirely. In one noteworthy case, the agency declined a proposed music video involving numerous boats, “support vehicles,” and the release of 100 doves.


The rapids of Lough Hyne boast dense stands of Laminaria kelp, which can withstand the strong tidal flows in this long, narrow channel. Video by Grant Callegari.

On paper, the system looks good, but there are flaws. Although some of the permits regulate changes on land—such as an increase in livestock density or the application of fertilizer or pesticide—that could impact life in the lough, the rules don’t apply to existing farms, just new ones. What’s more, those permits are controlled by the Department of Agriculture, Food, and the Marine. So, while activities on land could damage life in the lough, there’s nothing that National Parks can do to regulate them.

Meanwhile, the Department of Agriculture’s policies have done little to help life in Lough Hyne. Despite attempts from Europe to limit slurry use on farms, the Irish government has negotiated with the European Commission to allow Irish dairy farmers to apply slurry at 30 percent above recommended limits. The impact of that policy—in terms of ongoing pollution—is evident.

Under the EU Habitats Directive, nations have legal duties to assess the combined impacts of authorized activities and to take remedial action if wildlife declines occur. Currently, neither is happening at Lough Hyne. National Parks has assessed the impact of recreational kayaking—and deemed it negligible—but it has yet to assess the wider impact on the reserve.

More concerning is the lack of enforcement. The current ranger covers 1,000 square kilometers, an area 1,000 times larger than that overseen by Bohane. That limits the ranger’s ability to ensure that visitors follow rules—a problem, given that poaching is ongoing. “There’s a lot of poaching,” says Trowbridge. “Lobsters, scallops—the big scallops,” and even purple urchins, which threatens their recovery, says the scientist. A spokesperson for National Parks says the agency has followed up on reports of poaching by sending staff out on patrol, but that they did not witness any illegal activity. However, the agency admits that “it is impossible to rule out poaching of animals in any location, including Lough Hyne.”


A lobster patrols the bottom of Lough Hyne. Image by Grant Callegari. Ireland, 2024.

Conservation experts say that for marine protected areas to work in practice, they need a management plan that allocates resources and staff, with planned reviews and evaluation of progress toward the site’s conservation goals. Although Lough Hyne has conservation objectives, National Parks still isn’t monitoring or evaluating whether those goals are being met, let alone making a plan to change tack when things go awry. “It’s their marine reserve,” says Little. “They’re supposed to be looking after it.”


Video by Grant Callegari. Ireland, 2024.

V


It’s hard to know what the future holds for Lough Hyne. In the last few years, the Irish government has poured money into its environmental agencies. National Parks, which in 2019 had an annual budget of just over €13-million, will receive €78-million in 2025. The agency’s staffing has increased almost 60 percent over what it was in 2020. In February 2024, the EU awarded €15.14-million to Ireland to expand and enforce its network of marine protected areas. Then, this summer, a new EU regulation came into force that could strengthen the protection of designated sites. The Irish government committed to adopting the bill—called the Nature Restoration Law—by 2026 and allocated €3.15-billion for implementation. In practical terms, National Parks will have more resources than ever to effectively monitor and protect its ocean reserves. These wins, however, have stemmed from Green Party backing; if the upcoming general election puts more conservative leadership in power, support for National Parks could just as easily vanish.

Either way, the National Parks and Wildlife Service currently has no plans to substantively change how it manages the lough. Though “we’ve noticed a big loss in marine populations,” a management plan specific to Lough Hyne is unlikely to fix the problem, says O’Donnell of National Parks. That’s in part because National Parks refutes the suggestion that overcrowding at the lough is having an adverse impact on wildlife. “There are people who aren’t happy with the level of [activity] … they’re entitled to their opinion. But that’s not an opinion that we share, and we don’t think that we need to do anything in relation to it,” says O’Donnell. More broadly, the agency believes the chief problem befalling Lough Hyne—nutrient pollution along the whole coastline—is beyond its control.

It is true that if nutrients continue to pollute Ireland’s south coast, even ambitious measures—a full-time ranger on site, a routine monitoring program for wildlife and water quality, and a management plan—won’t halt or reverse the decline of life in Lough Hyne. But is this really where its story ends? Isn’t the whole point of conferring protection a call to action—to save a species or a place in the face of challenges? And if Ireland’s government fails to help tiny Lough Hyne, what does that suggest for larger conservation efforts elsewhere, given that the global ocean is falling afoul of pollution and climate change?


Bullock Island, located at the mouth to Lough Hyne, shelters the sea enclave from the force of the Atlantic Ocean. Image by Grant Callegari. Ireland, 2024.

There are examples from farther afield that could point Ireland toward a better outcome at Lough Hyne, even if the sources of pollution are out of National Parks’ direct control. A 2018 high court ruling in the Netherlands, for instance, found that damage to nature reserves from excessive nitrogen use on nearby farms was in breach of the EU Habitats Directive, the same law protecting Lough Hyne. The European Commission has since approved a plan of €1.47-billion to compensate affected Dutch farmers who voluntarily close their holdings, calling the scheme “necessary and appropriate.” Hundreds have so far signed up, though the closures have not happened yet.

There is also an example from Ireland’s own southern coast, at a protected site called Bannow Bay. There, the conservation organization Coastwatch has worked with National Parks, the EPA, and the local community to reduce nutrient inputs from farming, among other activities, and managed to restore native seagrass beds. Karin Dubsky, cofounder of Coastwatch, attributes the success, in part, to a local National Parks ranger who understood the problem and saw potential solutions.

Following our work on Castle Island, Little, Stirling, and I make our way to another point, near the southwest corner of the lough. We tie our dinghies to a rock and step onto a grassy hummock. Ahead of us lies an abandoned white stone building fronted with gray and green asbestos. A large sign announces it as Kitching’s Laboratory. Through a side window, I spy lab equipment still arrayed on benches, as though the occupant has just walked out for lunch.

To the left is a derelict, doorless shed and inside it, an upturned, black wooden rowboat. Kitching once used it to explore the wonders of a little-known lough. Now it has also been left to the elements. “If we could just turn back the clock to 1980, that would be fine. That would sort everything,” says Little, only half joking. “Too much influence, too many visitors. That’s what’s wrong with Lough Hyne,” he offers, more seriously.


Jack Kitching’s laboratory, situated in the southwestern corner of the lough, was erected between 1952 and 1957. During the 1960s, the building facilitated marine biologists visiting mostly from the United Kingdom. It is now out of use due to safety issues. Image by Grant Callegari. Ireland, 2024.

Lough Hyne may never again be what it once was—a sleepy Irish sea enclave taken over by a bunch of inquisitive, eccentric ecologists, for the sole purpose of understanding nature. Perhaps the world has changed too much. And perhaps the lough’s importance now lies in its potential to show a way forward for ocean conservation in a time when threats increasingly transcend jurisdictional, and agency, boundaries.

Making our way back to the dinghies, I clamber in alongside Stirling and start to row after Little. He makes good, fluid progress toward the north shore as I fall farther and farther behind. Stirling feigns frustration and seizes control of the stubby oars. “I’d like to get home for lunch,” she quips. We glide across the lough smoothly now, and more quickly, taking in the scene before us—an inquisitive seal trailing our path, a single heron swooping low over the calm water, and nearby, a bustle of bathers gathering in the car park, ready for their plunge.


Editor: Sarah Gilman

Photo/video: Grant Callegari

Fact checker: Jax Knox

Commissioning editor: Jude Isabella

Art director: Mark Garrison

Production: David Garrison

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