Monthly Archives: March 2022

Bryozoa-workshop at Espegrend

February 14th -18th 2022

The Bryozoa are maybe not the most famous of animals, so let’s start with a quick rundown: Bryozoa, also known as Polyzoa, Ectoprocta, or moss animals (mosdyr, på norsk) are a phylum of aquatic invertebrates. Bryozoans, together with phoronids and brachiopods, have a special feeding structure called a lophophore, a “crown” of hollow tentacles used for filter feeding, which you can see in action in the video Tine captured:

In Norway we have 292 species registered, of which 281 are marine (Kunnskapsstatus for artsmangfoldet 2020, pdf here). It is estimated that the actual number of species present is higher. Further, several known species are considered “door knocker species” that may establish here within the next 50 years.

Bryozoa mostly live in colonies made up of tiny individual animals called zooids, which grow in a variety of shapes, and some of them provide structural habitats for other species. They are food for many other animals, namely nudibranchs, fish, sea urchins, pycnogonids, crustaceans, mites and starfish. Marine bryozoans are often responsible for biofouling on ships’ hulls, on docks and marinas, and on offshore structures. They are among the first colonizers of new or recently cleaned structures, and may hitchhike to new places with marine traffic. (Bonus: they have a super interesting fossil record, and this can be used to tell us more about the world in the way back!)

A few of the shapes the colonies can grow in. Pictured are 1: Membraniporella nitida 2: Bugula sp. 3: Flustrella hispida 4: Crisia eburnea

They are one of the focus groups of Hardbunnsfauna: there is still a lot we do not know about them!

Ernst Haeckel – Kunstformen der Natur (1904), plate 23: Bryozoa. Public domain, accessed through Wikipedia

Planning in a pandemic is not easy, and we have had to postpone our plans for this gathering several times. The second week of February we could finally gather our “Team Bryozoa” here in Bergen for a week of in-depth studies of these fascinating animals.

Team Bryozoa (centre), from left Piotr, Mali, Jo and Lee Hsiang, and some of the animals they studied. Group photo by Piotr Kuklinski

In total we were 11 participants;
University Museum of Bergen: Endre, Jon, Tom and Katrine,
Natural History Museum in Oslo: Lee Hsiang and Mali,
NTNU University Museum: Torkild, Tine (MSc. student) and Tiril (MSc. student),
and our two visitors from abroad:
from the Institute of Oceanology, Polish Academy of Sciences came Piotr,
and from the Heriot Watt University (Orkney Campus), Joanne.

The main focus of the workshop was to get as many samples and species as possible identified, work though the DNA barcode vouchers from samples submitted in advance and reach a consensus on which species the dubious ones were, to network with our colleagues, and to include the students in the work and the team. It all went swimmingly, and a we had a very productive and enjoyable week!

check out @hardbunnsfauna on Instagram for more!

 

We set up camp on Espegrend Marine Biological station, and combined long days in the lab studying material collected throughout the project with shorter trips out on R/V Hans Brattstrøm.

Here we collected live colonies, introduced the students to various collecting methods, and let everyone catch some fresh fjord air.

 

Tine (top left) working together with Mali in the lab and in the field.

 

 

Tine is doing her master thesis on the species distribution of Bryozoa in shallow water along the Norwegian coast.

During the workshop she got the chance to have some of the difficult species identifications verified by the experts,  and she prepared a plate of 95 tissue samples that will be DNA barcoded though NorBOL.

 

 

Tiril, top left, together with Jon on the ship and working in the lab.

 

We also had Tiril with us, who is just starting out on what will become a thesis on ascidians (sea squirts), most likely with a focus on species in the genus Botryllus and Botrylloides. 

She worked together with Tom, getting familiar with the literature and the methods used for working on the group. Like Tine, she will be using a combination of traditional morphology based methods and genetic data.

 

A few impressions from the week

Going forward we’ll first send the plate of tissue samples to CCDB to be sequenced, fingers crossed for good results! During the week, *so many* samples were identified, so we will certainly be preparing more plates during the spring. All the identified samples will be included into the scientific collections of the museum.

Thank you so much to all the participants for their efforts!

-Katrine

Throwback Thursday; HYPCOP workshop at the museum

The project of studying hyperbenthic copepods (HYPCOP) is unique in multiple ways; we study a very unknown group of marine copepod species with very little taxonomic knowledge available here, in Norway. It is challenging as there are more than 700 species described, and possibly more. With pandemic lockdowns, it was hard to have international specialists come and help us, so we had to rely on resources available locally. With so many institutes involved from different corners of Norway, it was not always easy to meet up physically to work on our collection. Hence, when it happens, it is a memorable event, and valuable progress for the project is made.

One of the many species of copepod we have here in the collection at the UiB museum

We have Tone Falkenhaug as the project leader, situated at the Institute of Marine Research in Flødevigen (IMR), than we have our collaborator from Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA), Anders Hobæk and the three technicians at the department of natural history from the University of Bergen. The year before we all got together in Flødevigen, so for 2021 we decided that it would be Bergen to have another workshop.

From ltr; Anders Hobæk, Cessa Rauch, Tone Falkenhaug and Francisca Carvalho making the picture

A year into our project we managed to build up a substantial collection of benthic copepods; currently we have around 460 registered specimens, and 195 off those are barcoded with two different DNA markers, mitochondrial (COI) and ribosomal (16S). What keeps ahead of us is the monster task of working through our specimens to label the DNA barcodes with morphological identifications. It means many hours of very precise work with the finest needles, while sitting at the microscope.

During our workshop in Bergen we got together to work through one of the copepod family trees we generated from their DNA:

Preliminary tree of the COI mitochondrial marker

Anders Hobæk is a taxonomist with many years of experience dissecting copepods, and together we went through the samples one by one. It is very satisfying to be able to identify a specimen and get the to the same species level as the DNA barcode. There are multiple reasons as why we choose to identify species based on morphology.

Not all species are easy to barcode, as copepods, especially the benthic ones, are often so extremely tiny; it is difficult to get good quality DNA extracted from them.

Copepods are tiny; this one with scalebar

The small quantities of copepod DNA goes hand in hand with greater risk of contamination of other surrounding DNA, especially if you work with more general markers. Besides, even if we have the DNA barcode, not all copepod DNA is identified as such, which means that even with the right DNA, when running it through the database, it tells us that we have fly DNA, to give an example. Last but not least, in a lot of cases, we were not able to get good DNA sequences from the copepod extracts, so the only option is identifying them morphologically, by dissecting the animals and with help of literature identify the right genus, or even better, the species.

Species identification with help of literature, here a page from G.O. Sars

Our next workshop shall take place again in Flødevigen, in the meantime we keep you updated about our planet of the copepods.

Follow us for more copepod content @planetcopepod, see you there!

 

-Cessa