The scientists playing hide-and-seek with peek-a-boo prawns

As "art forms" go, spying prawns underwater may not be on your bingo card.

But scientists like Dr Pia Schuchert at the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI) train for years to spot the seabed dwellers - Nephrops norvegicus as they are known to their expert friends.

"We normally think they might be running around - and they are sometimes, they're very cute," she said.

"But they live in burrows under the sea."

That makes them very difficult to count, and keeping track of numbers is critical for protecting this economically-important species.

An international group of seasoned experts and newly-qualified researchers have spent a week in Northern Ireland training for this year's survey in the summer.

While scientists call them Nephrops, most people will know them as Dublin Bay prawns, langoustines, Portavogie prawns or scampi.

Every year, Underwater Television (UWTV) surveys are carried out to monitor the seabed in several different locations, using cameras on sleds.

The footage is then studied and analysed by teams across the UK and Ireland to assess how the species is faring and help set fishing quotas.

Prawns have a whole secret life on the seabed, according to Schuchert.

"They build like huge holes and excavations, and that's where they live and spend most of their time in," she said.

"So we have to actually assume that they are in their burrows, and we count the number of burrows as a proxy for the numbers of individual Nephrops that we have."

Spotting the burrows is where the art comes in.

The scientists shared their footage and their skills at the week-long school in AFBI's facility in Belfast, learning to determine what was and wasn't a prawn burrow by looking for specific characteristics.

"It's got a little kind of driveway where they push out the sand from the burrow," Schuchert said.

"But it also has got, normally you can see, it needs to have like two or more entrances so they can go through.

"So there are quite a few characteristics that we actually look at - and some of them are very difficult to identify."

Picking out a burrow from the other holes that may be present, the other fish swimming around and the stirred-up silt is a skill Dr Heidy Dias joined the AFBI-led school to learn.

She is part of the team behind a seabed-mapping project, which is on course to see Northern Ireland become the first part of the UK to have its entire seabed recorded.

"We do a lot of underwater TV videos and we come across different substrate types and everything," she said.

"So we do not really know what happens on the seabed sometimes."

The technology allows the survey to be carried out with minimal disruption to the shellfish.

But it gives scientists like Dias crucial insight.

"Knowing that there are burrows and identifying what type of burrow is that, that's very interesting and also an advantage for us as seabed mappers - to know what's underneath and what's really happening down on the seabed there," she added.

Figures show that prawn fishing is worth £114 million a year to the UK and €61 million (£53 million) to Ireland, making them economically significant.

They play an important environmental role too, by consuming decaying matter and algae and as a food source for other species.

Specialists at AFBI and fisheries scientists like Jennifer Doyle at the Marine Institute in Galway have worked together for many years, studying the western part of the Irish Sea.

For Doyle, Nephrops are an "interesting creature" that has them all understandably fascinated.

"The prawn stocks and Nephrops stocks are highly commercial and very important to both fishing nations," she said.

"I've never seen so many monitors and people at a workshop with such great intent and great enthusiasm for learning this new skill of burrow identification."

The two institutes also work with the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (CEFAS), based in Lowestoft in England.

It looks after the eastern side of the Irish Sea.

Shellfish scientist Chris Firmin joined colleagues from across the UK and Ireland, both virtually and in person, to share the skills and knowledge that go into making the annual count a precise scientific survey.

"It's really pleasing here to see a lot of new scientists have been doing superbly in getting up to speed with how to read and identify these borough complexes under the sea," he said.

"Nephrops are fascinating little beasts - being able to survey the animals, to look at them underwater.

"We don't need to catch them, but you can see the whole of the habitat, see everything that's going on."