From April 13th to 19th 2024, the Ocean City of Bergen celebrated the ocean even more than usual(!) in a happening called One Ocean Week (OOW).

One Ocean Week held conferences, meetings, workshops and activities – aiming to pioneer a sustainable use of the ocean.

The marine group at the University Museum was a prolific participant during the event, here are some of our contributions!

Anne Helene was invited to give the opening talk at the reception in the Aula, placing the Museum and Bergen into the heart of the Norwegian ocean exploration beginning with “The Norwegian North-Atlantic Expedition 1876–78”.

Anne Helene giving the opening talk during the festivitas in the Aula at the University Museum. Photo: Jenny Smedmark

Screenshot from the documentary. Do follow the link -> to watch if you haven’t already! Photo: OceanX

Aino also made a guest apperance in the aula as the documentary about “Seeing jellyfish as they should be seen” made by the OceanX media team was shown.

Saturday brought a presentation at Skolten about the UiB/OceanX-expedition last August, where Joan and Anne Helene presented some of their exciting new findings together with Henrik and Øyvind from BIO – and even Mattie of OceanX participated, calling in from the OceanXplorer in Singapore!

Presentations of what we found during the OceanX/UiB cruise last summer, where we explored old locatlities in the Norwegian Sea, and visited some of our fjords using the world’s most advanced research vessel. Pictured are Anne Helene, Joan and Henrik – with their animals! Photos: Katrine Kongshavn

On Sunday the 14^th most of us were at Festningskaien with a plethora of activities during the “Family Day”.

Our tent at the Family Day. Photo: Joan J- Soto-Angel

For our “Meet marine biologists from the University Museum” we brought with us five activities focusing on different areas of research that we do.

We had:

• Sharks (see SharkReferences.com for more), with a shark tooth quiz, info about sharks in Norway, and the chance to see shark skin up close.
• Bipolar animals (project Pole2Pole) where people could explore the distribution of animals that occur in one- or both- of the poles, and learn more about why that may be the case
• Polychaetes (project MAnDAriN) with a quiz of trying to match images of colourful bristle worms to their common names
• A task on Jellyfish parasites(!) (project ParaZoo) where you were to diagnose which parasite our unfortunate jellyfish suffered from, and finally
• Moss animals (project NorDigBryo) where you could learn more about these animals, see them up close, and pick up a booklet with fun facts and some riddles to solve.
  

  Our activities. From top left: Jellyfish doctor, bipolar animals, guess the worm, sharks, and moss animals. Images: Joan J. Soto-Angel

  Two of the museum pedagogues used our tent as the base for their theatre-based activity “The ice is melting! It is for real!” – so we had penguins too!

  

  The penguins Piia and Pling in action. Photo: Odette Tetlie

  At the Natural History Museum, our researchers offered free talks on topics of their choice; one talk every day (Tues-Fri). The topics covered here were:

  Who eats whom? Marine worms with jaws – delicious and dangerous! (Nataliya)
  Jellyfish in Norway – mostly harmless or murderous monsters? (Aino)
  Sharks of Norway (Nico)
  Elusive biodiversity: a journey through the less known but most exquisite groups of marine animals (Manuel)

  

  Manuel during his presentation at the Natural History Museum. Photo: Cessa Rauch

  Nico also gave a talk at the scientific conference Ocean Outlook: the North Atlantic Ocean climate, deep sea and environment, on the topic “Bioluminescence in deep-sea sharks: evolution and functions.”

It was a hectic, but fun week!

-Katrine on behalf of the marine group