“Cormorants are a really interesting population, in that, 200-300 years ago, there were barely any around the UK coast, or on St. Kilda, and the western isles as well, but they expanded when they arrived in Shetland in the late 1800s, and now they're everywhere. We see them as one of the really common seabirds, but actually, although they are breeding down off the southwest of Britain as well, their populations increased over a century and then in the last 20 - 30 years, they're showing quite a dramatic decline.

And there was always a lot of discussion about how much of that change originally was down to climate change tor to oceanographic change, and how much of it was due to a change in human predation in places like Iceland and the Faroes.

So there had been a decrease in human predation… and there was an opportunity for those populations to expand.

…That highlights the nature of a lot of our work: we’re trying to look at a lot of these populations and understand how their numbers are changing, due to different types of environmental change, whether that’s what we’re doing with our fisheries, or climate change, or indeed other wildlife populations moving into areas that the existing animals are in and then competing with them.”