The three-masted barque Statsraad Lehmkuhl, decked out for a week of ocean festivities. Photo: Katrine Kongshavn
The “Ocean City Bergen” was especially ocean-themed between April 5th to 11th during the annual One Ocean Week.
One Ocean Week – held every April – features more than 150 events, stretching from conferences, summits and meetings to family experiences and cultural activities.
The marine group of the Natural History Department wanted in on the fun this year as well*, and signed up to run two activities:
🎪🧪🔬a big stand at the outdoor science fair on Family Day, and
✨🪼🪱💚 an evening event with a series of short popular science talks in the Literature House on April 9th.
Going chronologically, we start with a post about the FAMILY DAY, which took place on Festningskaien on Sunday April 6th.
Photos: Joan J. Soto-Angel (UiB), Katrine Kongshavn (UiB), Ross Robertson (Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama)
We brought five activities:
Jellyfish doctor 🪼🩺
Bipolar animals 🐧🗺️🐻❄️
A homemade marine edition of the “Guess Who?” game 😶🌫️
Micro-snails and coloring plates 🐌🎨🖍️
A game of trying to “Guess the baby” belonging to various marine animals based on their baby pictures. 👶->😊 🐛->🦀
Images of the five different activities: a) Guess Who? b) Guess the baby, c) Bipolar animals, d) jellyfish doctor e) colouring of microgastropoda (Photos: Katrine Kongshavn, Praveen Raj)
It is so, so impressive to see how quickly kids grasp the different concepts, and how much they know already!
Even so, there’s always something new to learn – and it’s really fun to get to be the one to teach someone something cool about what lives in the sea!
We had a steady stream of kids – and adults! – wanting to test out the various activities, and the hours flew by!
A lot of thought (and crafting!) has gone into the activities to make them both fun and educational, so it was great to see that they were popular! Photos: Nataliya Budaeva, Katrine Kongshavn, Vincent McDaniel
Thank you so much both to our wonderful team of students and staff that made and ran the activities, and all the visitors!
-Katrine
Our other event, “Exploring marine life”, gets a post to itself, you can find it here:
*We were also very active during OOW 2024 – you can read more about that here: