Flannery could hardly believe what he saw: what on Earth was a flapper skate egg doing in the Irish Sea, a place where the species had long gone all but extinct? Could the presence of a flapper skate egg in the Irish Sea be a hint that the species is slowly recovering? Today, their numbers are vanishingly small, with only a handful occasionally spotted off the coast of Kerry - never in the Irish Sea. There is no evidence of a viable population in the Irish Sea, but because scientists had long assumed the population was, in Collins’s words, “kaput”, nobody has been looking. It’s a tantalising prospect: that the Irish Sea is benefiting from an overspill from marine protected areas in other jurisdictions.
