Mollusken uit opgedoken visnetten. Twee rondes Duik de Noordzee Schoon in 2019

In 2019 for the first time ‘Stichting Duik de Noordzee Schoon’ (ddnzs Foundation, or Dive to Clean the North Sea) organised two campaigns of dive teams recovering fishing nets and other materials from wrecks in the North Sea. The first expedition visited wrecks on and near Dogger Bank, the second localities close to the Dutch coast. Data regarding the mollusc fauna of the wrecks was gathered by sampling the retrieved fishing nets, via seabed samples taken by the divers and also some species were photographed during dives or on board. Several species were recorded that were not seen in earlier ddnzs expeditions. Lamellaria latens (O. F. Müller, 1776) and Velutina plicatilis (O. F. Müller, 1776) have been recorded for the first time as autochthonous in the Dutch sector of the North Sea. A specimen of Cerithiopsis tubercularis (Montagu, 1803) is the second autochthonous record from the southern North Sea. Several species that until recently were not or hardly known from the southern North Sea (including Modiolula phaseolina (Philippi, 1844), Sphenia binghami Turton, 1822, Trivia arctica (Pulteney, 1799), Xanderovula patula (Pennant, 1777), Tritia incrassata (Strøm, 1768) and Philine punctata (J. Adams, 1800)) have been found on various wrecks and during these and previous ddnzs campaigns. Most of these are well known from the rocky shores of the British Isles. Evidently, the thousands of wrecks on the sea bed harbour a hard substratum fauna that has been overlooked in most past seabed samplings (which usually focused on soft sediments).