 Hello, my name is Mike Steer. I'm the Research Director for Saudi Aquatic Sciences, which is the research arm of PERSA. And today I'll be presenting the updated survey results for the giant Australian cuttlefish spawning population. The purpose of this presentation is to give you some indication of how we undertake the surveys and interpreting the latest results. So each winter, tens of thousands of giant Australian cuttlefish aggregate along a thin stretch of coastline around Point Lowly, which is north of Waila in northern Spencer Gulf, South Australia. They tend to start aggregating in May, peak in June, and then Peter off in July, August and September. Now, Saudi undertake a survey every year, and we try and coincide that survey with the peak spawning in June, and we have ten survey sites that extend around Point Lowly and up until Fitzgerald Bay. At each one of those sites, we send a team of divers down, and those divers undertake anywhere between four and eight 50 metre transects. Along each of those 50 metre transects, any cuttlefish that is encountered within one metre either side of the tape is recorded, and the divers also try and record the sex of that animal and estimate its relative size. In times, there could be quite a number of cuttlefish within that area, and the divers can take a considerable amount of time. It's really important that when the divers are undertaking that survey, they check in all the crevices and dens and gaps in the rocky reef, because quite often you'll have females wedged right underneath the rocks, whether either taking refuge or they're actually laying eggs. What we then get is an estimate of how many cuttlefish there are per unit area, so how many per metre squared. And from that, we can then scale them up to our known area estimate of available habitat for each one of those sites, add them all together, and then we come up with an estimate of abundance, a population abundance for that survey. The estimates of size then give us some indication of the relative weight of those individuals, and we can also calculate a relative biomass as well from those estimates of size. So we end up with two sources of information. We ended up with a time series of cuttlefish abundance, and we also have a time series of cuttlefish biomass. So here are the results from when we started in 1998, all the way through this year. 1998 was the year when fishing was allowed, and 1999 is when the closure was put in place in Falls Bay. You can see that through time, there was a decrease really to low levels in 2013, which was a cause for concern. And there was a whole heap of research that was directed towards trying to understand the cause for that decline. And we've seen a subsequent rebound in that population quite dramatically over a relatively short period of time. And incredibly, we've seen, well, quite a large increase in the population abundance in 2020, a record level. So in excess of 240,000 individuals were estimated to occur along that stretch of Point Lely Reef in June of this year. We then come up with a calculator, a biomass estimate, and you notice that even though we've got a record high cuttlefish abundance estimate, our biomass estimate isn't reflective of that record high. And there's a number of reasons for that. The main one is that the population seems to have consisted of a lot of smaller animals than it has in the past. And I'll go through that, I'll go through that. So if you look at these three figures, the first one at the top here just gives us an indication of the sex ratio of the population. And this tells us that we see more males to females on that spawning aggregation. And in 2020, we had basically a five to one ratio between males and females. And this is pretty typical of that spawning population. In fact, you don't really, you don't ever see it as a one to one relationship through time. Now, if you look at the average size of the animals, of the males and females across all surveys, this red line represents the long term average for both males and females. And these bars represent the average size of those animals, each subsequent survey. And you can see that we've had a decline in the relative size of males over the past three or four surveys and similarly with females. But it's important to note here that we've changed the way that we estimate size. Since 2013, we no longer touch the animals. We just estimate their size from a distance, which of course has quite a lot of variation in those estimates. Previously, we used to collect a subsample of cuttlefish that we estimate underwater, take them to the surface and then measure them on board a vessel. But we figured that's no longer appropriate given that we're trying to leave that population undisturbed. So I guess the take home message from this is that we should place greater emphasis on the number of cuttlefish on the site rather than the biomass. So in summary, the 2020 population estimates are the highest on record, much higher than 180 plus thousand that we saw in 1999. The biomass estimates reflect to some degree smaller animals, but remember we're approximating individual size underwater, which has obviously some issues around it. And overall, the population has indeed returned to healthy levels since that 2013 decline. As we saw, there's a high level of annual variation. We've seen booms and busts in this population over the past 20 plus years. So it really highlights how important these annual surveys are in terms of monitoring this population. So this year, very happy to see the highest number of animals on record. And thanks very much for taking the time to tune into this presentation.