Today, June 8th, is the World Oceans Day, and of course we should celebrate the big old blue!
In wind or calm, with nice substrate or impossible-to-wash-clay samples, in rain and in sun – we love it! (photos: K.Kongshavn)
Join in on the celebrations with #WorldOceansDay
If not big, then certainly many!
Pictured is a Goniada multidentata (you guessed it, “many toothed”!), photographed in a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). The lower photo has been coloured afterwards to better show the placement of the teeth.
Don’t worry though, the whole animal is only a few millimetre long, so you are not on its menu!
The species was first described in the yearbook of Bergen Museum (now the University Museum of Bergen) in Arwidsson, Ivar. (1899). Studien über die Familien Glyceridae und Goniadidae. Bergens Museums Aarbog. 1898(11): 1-69, plates I-IV., which is available online at http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/130141#page/257/mode/1up
This specimen was collected by the R/V “Dr. Fridtjof Nansen” and has been identified as part of our MIWA – Marine Invertebrates of Western Africa – project. We’re working on a poster on the diversity of Glyceridae and Goniadidae of the region that will be presented at the 12th International Polychaete Conference in Wales this summer.
An alternate world?
The week flew by in a flurry of Latin names, literature and sea water – today is the day for unpacking, making sure that everything is stored safely, and revising lists.
An impressive collection of species on the final day!
A voucher, neatly laid out and ready to be pressed.
Pressing voucher specimens
Tissue samples
In total we collected 88 samples of 76 different species, most of which are not in the BOLD database for Norway yet. It will be exciting to see what results we get!
The tissue samples will be sent to the Saunders lab, as they have kindly offered collaborate on this collection and help us with the sequencing as our go-to lab in NorBOL is not optimally set up to deal with algae.
Thank you so much to all the students and teachers for being so welcoming, and for being good sports about me spiriting away your specimens!
The red, the brown, and the green
This week the invertebrates are forced to take second place (!) as I have joined the master students participating on the course BIO309A – marine floristics out at our field station.
Lab work
The course is the sister course to Marine faunistics that I joined in on last fall. The focus of this week is the macroalgae; the seaweeds that most people are (passingly) familiar with. (The micro algae have been covered in lectures and lab work back at BIO earlier.)
We are doing a mix of field work and lab work. Every day we go out and sample, and bring the catch back to the lab to identify it. 1-2 specimens of each species that is identified is destined to become barcode vouchers for NorBOL, and go through the by now fairly familiar route of photo-tissue sampling-preservation for inclusion in the museum collection as a voucher. Seaweeds fixate badly in ethanol, so instead we are pressing them and making herbarium specimens. So far we have about 50 vouchers (from almost as many different species), and the number is sure to climb as we continue working our way through the fresh stuff we just collected.
Collecting just outside the station
Kjersti is explaining about the current habitat
Ah, such a hard day to be at sea!
Vivid!
Being ferried across to the island where we’ll examine the tide pools
Nice location!
“that one!”
Hunting
Wave exposed!
I do “happen” to find some animals *on the algae as well – here’s a beautiful nudibranch, a Doto cf. maculata
Undercover amphipod
Hydrozoans and two Aplysia punctata hanging out on a piece of Ascophyllum nodosum
Initiated in 2013 by Dr. Terry McGlynn, March 19th has become
the International Taxonomist Appreciation Day!
The what, now?
Carl von Linné 1707–1778 painted by A. Roslin (Wikimedia)
Taxonomy is the science of naming, describing and classifying organisms and includes all plants, animals and microorganisms of the world. Using morphological, behavioural, genetic and biochemical observations, taxonomists identify, describe and arrange species into classifications, including those that are new to science.
Modern taxonomy began with Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778), who devised the formal binominal (two-part) naming system we use to classify all lifeforms. Since then, approximately 1.7 million animal species have been formally described (according to the IUCN (2014)).
It is of course impossible to give a definite number for how many species that are still awaiting recognition and formal description, but a estimate by Mora et al. in 2011 suggest that
In spite of 250 years of taxonomic classification and over 1.2 million* species already catalogued in a central database, our results suggest that some 86% of existing species on Earth and 91% of species in the ocean still await description. Renewed interest in further exploration and taxonomy is required if this significant gap in our knowledge of life on Earth is to be closed.
From Buzz Hoot Roar
If you want to know more about what taxonomists do, you can have a read here: Taxonomy matters. Here’s why (Lyman Museum at McGill University).
There is a lot of work still to be done – and far too few taxonomists available to do it – so please appreciate the ones that we have!
Celebrate the day by
Mora C, Tittensor DP, Adl S, Simpson AGB, Worm B (2011) How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean? PLoS Biol 9(8): e1001127.
The World Conservation Union (2014) IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2014.3. Summary Statistics for Globally Threatened Species. Table 1: Numbers of threatened species by major groups of organisms (1996–2014))
*see paper for explanation for this number vs the 1.7 million of the IUCN.
Sea slugs and San Francisco
Phanerophthalmus sp. from Mozambique. Photo: Manuel A. E. Malaquias
I am three months into the second year of my masters in marine biology, and was lucky enough to start off this semester with a three week trip to San Francisco in order to collect material for my project.
I am writing my master thesis for the University museum of Bergen on the phylogenetic systematics and evolution of a small marine gastropod.
The title of my project is “Patterns of speciation in the Indo-West Pacific, with a systematic review of the genus Phanerophthalmus (Cephalaspidea, Haminoeidae)”.
I will be using an integrative taxonomic approach combining fine-scale anatomical dissections and molecular phylogenetics to revise the taxonomy and be able to better understand the relationships of the species. The group is restricted to the shallow waters of the Indo-West Pacific and may therefore be used as a good model to study speciation and the historical biogeography of other organisms in this region.
In order to obtain specimens for this project loans have been made from various museums and academic institutions around the world. In total I have 60 specimens on loan from these various institutions, however they still only represent part of the diversity of the genus with limited geographical coverage. The California Academy of Sciences (CAS) in San Francisco holds the largest collection of sea slugs in the World, including specimens of the genus Phanerophthalmus, with over 100 specimens. So, it was arranged for me to visit this large collection and assess what was important for my project. Travelling to CAS also meant I was able to work alongside Dr. Terry Gosliner, a leading expert in the field of malacology.
Phanerophthalmus crawling on seagrass
Pier 39 and California sea lions
So, on January 16th I got on a 10 hour flight to San Francisco. I stayed at a guest house in the Richmond district of San Francisco, about 40 min walk or 30 min bus from CAS.
Waking up on Sunday morning I was a bit jetlagged, but super excited to be in San Francisco. As it was Martin Luther King Jr. day tomorrow (Monday), I had two days to recover from the flight and adjust to the time difference (9 hours behind Bergen!).
I decided to go and explore the city so I took a bus to downtown San Francisco and went to Fisherman’s Wharf, to Pier 39 where the Aquarium of the bay is and also the California sea lions.
On Monday I went to see where I was going to be spending the next three weeks: at the California Academy of Sciences. Situated in Golden Gate park, the surroundings were beautiful.
Golden Gate park
Golden Gate Bridge
After visiting the grounds of CAS I wandered over to the Golden Gate Bridge. There was rain in the air and the fog was coming down but the view of the bridge was spectacular.
California Academy of Sciences
Tuesday morning I arrived at CAS eager to dive into the collections. Terry met me at the staff entrance and after a chat and a coffee we got to work. The CAS database contained more than 100 specimens of Phanerophthalmus. The first few days were spent examining labels and matching live photos with specimens. The amount of material was a bit overwhelming and even though I would have liked to look at it all, this would not be possible during my short three week visit. So with guidance from my supervisor, Manuel Malaquias, I was able to focus on the most important specimens. As I am looking at the phylogeny of Phanerophthalmus it is important for me to have specimens which I can extract DNA from. It is also useful to know what these animals looked like live in order to maybe use the external morphology as a character for determining species.
The three weeks flew by so quickly. I spent my days with the collections, dissecting specimens and also got the opportunity to try the academy’s brand new scanning electron microscope. Terry was an amazing host and kept me busy. A huge thank you to him for dedicating so much time towards helping me out. Also, a huge thank you to everyone else at the academy for being so nice and welcoming. After my three weeks at CAS I had a few days to be a tourist in the city. My last weekend in the city happened to be Super Bowl 50 weekend and the city was buzzing with people and events. All in all I had a great visit, and now I have lots of material to carry on working with back in Bergen.
The collections (top), my dissection station (bottom left) and the male reproductive of Phanerophthalmus
Scanning electron microscope session with Terry
Alcatraz
The amazing redwood trees at Muir Woods just outside the city
Keep calm and focus on sea slugs
-Jenni
We started early with visitors for 2016; Mario arrived already on the 4th of January!
Mario, on his temporary spot in the lab, studying spaghetti worms.
Mario’s home institution is the University of Antioquia, in Medellin, Colombia, and the contrast to snow covered (and/or rain swept) Bergen has been great; this was his first time having snow beneath his shoes.
Arne
Another of our polychaete collaborators, Arne Nygren from Sjöfartsmuseet Akvariet in Gothenburg (Artsprosjekt can be found here (NO)) seized the chance to visit as well, and together with the resident polychaetologists (Jon, Tom and Nataliya) it meant that we suddenly had an impromptu polychaete workshop on our hands 🙂
Being able to meet in person makes the work flow smoother all around, as work was delegated and plans concretized. 2016 is likely to be a year with much focus on the Polychaeta, as it is both the final year of the PolyNor project (ends in spring), and the year of the 12th International Polychaete Conference, which will be held in Cardiff, Wales.
During Mario’s month-long stay he was examining the collection of terebellids from West Africa and the museum’s collection of the bristle worm genus Pista, much of which will later be barcoded through NorBOL (for the Norwegian material) and MIWA (for our West African samples).
Pista cristata identified by Dr. T. Holthe, one of the most important experts on spaghetti worms, from University of Bergen. RCP. Photo: MHL
In his own words:
Eupolymnia nebulosa after a collecting trip to Lysefjorden close to Bergen. Photo: MHL
I usually work on the morphology of just one of the several families of polychaetes, the Terebellidae, or spaghetti worms. This visit has been very important since we have been able to separate four Pista species from the North Sea, using both morphological and molecular tools. “The combination of these two different methods has been superb”.
Jon, Arne and I began this study during August 2014, but this undertaking seems like it will never end because we keep adding more material. The recent findings have been the significance of some characters that did not have taxonomical importance in the past. Now, they are the clues for splitting very close species.
But this is not enough; it was possible to identify 43 species of terebellids belonging to 16 different genera, from material collected along the West African coasts.
This is a high polychaete diversity in only one family. For example, we found three Lysilla species, in a region with only one recorded species. New species? Highly possible. One can only wonder what the diversity of the remaining families is?
Verticilate chaetae (bristles) from one of the polycirrinae species photographed through a microscope. Photo: MHL
Methyl-green staining pattern of one of Pista species. Photo: MHL
All this was accompanied with a perfect view through the window, seeing it snow some days, or watching the Sun on the mountains in front; some times with white top mountains, some times with deep blue sky. A landscape like that never could be my company in my tropical city.
Snowy view from the lab window Photo: MHL
Thank you for visiting, it was very nice having you here – we wish you the best of luck with your next adventure in Antarctica!
This gorgeous polychaete (bristle worm) is from the family Serpulidae, it was identified as a Pomatoceros triquetes during the students’ course in marine faunistics (Photo: K.Kongshavn)
Release the Kraken!
Oh, dear… this challenge:
Please share your love of biodiversity this Valentine’s Day with the hashtag #bdvalentine.
Have fun and help raise awareness of biodiversity and conservation!
We’ll be on Twitter and Facebook celebrating all day on Friday, February 12th with “Biodiversity Valentines.” Tweet your best biodiversity-themed Valentine message with the hashtag #bdvalentine. You can borrow from our growing Facebook gallery of #bdvalentine images here: https://goo.gl/dZkQdS .
Get your creative juices flowing (and your creative and communications folks brainstorming)! We’ll retweet and create a gallery of your images all day on Friday, February 12th.
At JRS, we’re working to increase the use of biodiversity data and information services for conservation and sustainable development in Africa. We love biodiversity data. Join in with your #bdvalentine!
ticked into our in-box from the JRS Biodiversity Foundation a couple of days ago, and we decided to give it a spin.
Now, biologists seem to gravitate towards punny (and occasionally funny) humour, and there’s been an avalanche of submissions and suggestions on what we could post.
Here’s a selection of submissions from the Invertebrate collections, we hope you’ll enjoy them!
Interspecies <3 between Laonice sarsi and L. bahusiensis (photo:T. Alvestad)
This little Cephalopod was collected by MAREANO. (Photo: K.Kongshavn)
This cuttlefish was encountered in an Aquarium, and thus does not reside in our collections! They belong to the class Cephalopoda, which also includes squid, octopodes, and nautiluses. Cuttlefish have a unique internal shell, the cuttlebone. Despite their name, cuttlefish are not fish but molluscs. (Photo: K.Kongshavn)
Not a local species! Jelly fish do not have a independent circulatory system, nor do they have structured organ systems, brain, or breathing apparatus.
A friendly (?) Isopod from the Cirolanidae family.
Uncini bristles from a Euclymene (Maldanidae) polychaete. The picture is taken with an Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) at our local SEM lab. The scale bar is 2 µm, or 0.002 mm, so these are truly TINY structures.
Here’s an Ebalia sp. that we have barcoded through NorBOL.
Here’s a Urticina eques (Photo: K.Kongshavn)
A Crossaster papposus collected for NorBOL together with the local student dive club SUB (Photo: K.Kongshavn)
A marine snail in the family Naticidae, also known as moon snails or necklace shells. These snails are predators, mainly feeding on Bivalves (Photo: K.Kongshavn)
Look at that face! We could not resist including him(?), even though it’s a vertebrate (Photo: K.Kongshavn)
apologies for the ear worm!
Well, we sure had fun – we hope you did too!
Make sure to check out other contributions to the hashtag #bdvalentine on Twitter and Facebook.
The Pleurobranchidae sea slug species Berthella sideralis was described by the Swedish malacologist Sven Ludvig Lovén in 1846 based on specimens collect at Bohuslän, in southern Sweden not far from the city of Gothenburg. This species has hardly been mentioned in the literature after its original description, and no images of life species are to our best knowledge available in books, research papers or even web platforms – until now!
A synthesis of the morphological features of B. sideralis can be found in Cervera et al. (2010) who studied in detail two specimens collected during 1930’s in Trondheimfjord as part of a phylogenetic study of the genus Berthella.
Recently, in late November 2015 during a Museum scientific cruise – there is a blog post about this day of field work here – we collected one specimen in Hjeltefjorden (around Bergen) at 220 meters depth using an RP-sledge. This specimen is here documented and was recently genetically barcoded as part of our effort to barcode the Norwegian marine fauna through the NorBOL project.
A live specimen of Berthella sideralis. The scale bar i 5 mm. Photo: K. Kongshavn
Berthella sideralis is only known from Sweden and Norway. In Norway it has been reported between Bergen and Finnmark.
Reference: Cervera, J L., Gosliner, T. M., García-Gómez, J. C., & Ortea, J. A. 2010. A new species of Berthella Blainville, 1824 (Opisthobranchia, Notaspidea) from the Canary Island (Eastern Atlantic Ocean), with a re-examination of the phylogenetic relationships of the Notaspidea. Journal of Molluscan Studies, 66: 301–311.
-Manuel & Katrine
For the final post of our advent calendar I would just like to say THANK YOU! to all my wonderful colleagues and the guest we’ve had at the collections throughout the year for contributing to making this job so interesting, rewarding and fun!
Biologists are usually somewhat elusive creatures, preferring to have the camera pointing at their research objects instead of at themselves. Still, here is the majority of the staff and visitors of the invertebrate collections in 2015 captured on camera – though some remain cryptic 🙂
Especial thank you goes to those who took time out of their busy schedules to join in on the calendar on such short notice (if we ever do this again we’ll try to start planning *before* the 30th of November…!)
And thank you to our blog readers for joining us on this little calendar adventure, I hope you enjoyed it – and maybe you even learned something new?
Have a wonderful holiday.
Best wishes, Katrine
PS: Did you manage to catch all of our Calendar posts?
Door #1: A day at sea
Door #2: The Leaf Sheep Sea Slug
Door #3: Prepare to be HYPNOtized
Door #4: A cushioned star
Door #5: A (so far) undescribed species of bristle worm
Door #6: Associated Amphipods
Door #7: Shrimp and salad
Door #8: One jar –> many, many vials
Door #9: Delving into the DNA
Door #10: Old Stoneface
Door #11: Just a white blob?
Door #12: Plankton sampling with a vertebrate view!
Door #13: Time for rejuvenation
Door #14: A world of colour and slime
Door #15: Guest researchers: Ivan
Door #16: First molecular-based phylogeny of onuphid bristle worms
Door #17: A marriage of art and science
Door #18: A photosynthetic animal
Door #19: The amphipods with the pointed hoods
Door #20: How many undescribed bristle worms live in Australian waters?
Door #21: A Norwegian oddity
Door #22: The Heart of the Museum
Door #23: Of MAREANO and the Museum
Door #24: Happy Holidays!
