Author Archives: katrine

On the hunt for seaweeds!

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 lagae as well - here's a beautiful nudibranch, a Doto cf. maculata

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

Today is Taxonomist Appreciation Day!

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

giving your local taxonomist a cup of coffee (or tea), and a word of encouragement (a big pile of money for research wouldn’t be amiss, either!)
check out the taxonomy pun contest at Buzz Hoot Roar (“a graphics-driven blog that shares and/or explains a scientific concept in 300 words or less”)
visit Curious Taxonomy for funny, punny, interesting and plain strange species names – and share your favourites!
Some of ours include:
Did you know that there is a genus of small marine snails named Ittibittium? These are – of course – smaller than molluscs of the genus Bittium.
Strategus longichomperus (Ratcliffe) is a Honduran scarab with long mandibles.
Ytu brutus (Spangler, 1980) is a water beetle, “Ytu” comes from the local (in Brazil) word for waterfall.
Has your favourite book/movie/game characters been honoured with a naming?
Aleiodes atuin, A. binkyi, A. deathi ++ (Butcher et al. 2012) are braconid wasps – all named from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. [Zootaxa 3457]
Darthvaderum (Hunt, 1996) is an oribatid mite “When I saw the SEM (scanning electron micrograph) of the gnathosoma I immediately thought of Darth Vader, evil antihero of Star Wars.” [Records of the Australian Museum 48: 303-324]
Gwaihiria (Nauman) is a diapriid wasp named for Gwaihir, Lord of the Eagles.
visit the Biodiversity Heritage Library and learn something new
visit the exhibitions at your local Natural History Museum (Bergen sadly excepted at the moment – we will open again in 2019!)
If you can read Norwegian, check out this post about Amphipod taxonomy and taxonomists, and peruse the ongoing biodiversity projects from the Norwegian Biodiversity Information Centre, where taxonomists work to better our knowledge of the local fauna and flora.
understand the value of Museum Collections for Research and Society
remember the naturalists who have perished in pursuit of knowledge by visiting The Wall of the Dead: A Memorial to Fallen Naturalists
tell your taxonomist co-workers that you appreciate their work!

#loveyourtaxonomist is the word of the day!

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.

Travelogue from Jenni’s field-trip to California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco

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 16^th 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

Guest researchers: Mario

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 12^th 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 one collecting trip to Lysefjord close to Bergen. Photo: MHL

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!

Biodiversity Valentines

This gorgeous polychaete (Bristle worm) is from the family Serpulidae, it was identfied as a Pomatoceros triquetes during the students' course in marine faunistics

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 (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)

We could not resist, even though it's a vertebrate (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.

Berthella sideralis, a rarity finally documented alive and barcoded!

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. Ths scale bar i 5 mm. Photo: K. Kongshavn

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

Door #24: Happy Holidays!

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?

You can find all of them here

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!

Door #23: Of MAREANO and the Museum

As mentioned earlier in our calendar, we have an extensive cooperation going on with the seabed mapping programme MAREANO*. You can read a lot more about MAREANO on the project home page, where you will also find many interesting videos and beautiful photographs from – quite literally – the bottom of the sea, as video transects are extensively used for mapping the sea floor and its biodiversity.

MAREANO very recently published a book named “The Norwegian Sea Floor – New Knowledge from MAREANO for Ecosystem-based Management”. As it presents the uniquely detailed mapping that is being carried out, it has received much attention (also internationally, more about that here and here (in Norwegian)). You can access the book as a pdf though the MAREANO web pages – check it out!

We wanted to include a post in our advent calendar about the part the University Museum plays regarding the thousands and thousands of biological samples that MAREANO generates. The MAREANO material is a big part of our everyday work here, and so it’s been blogged about before: follow the links to learn more our about cruise participation, workshops (e.g. here and here), new species described from UM based on MAREANO-material, and genetic barcoding through the Norwegian Barcode of Life (NorBOL) project.

Workshop on the MAREANO-sponges

From a workshop on Cumacean Crustacea collected by MAREANO - it was late in December,so of course we had to make gingerbread critters

From a workshop on Cumacea (Crustacea) collected by MAREANO – it was late in December, so of course we had to make gingerbread critters (that could be identified to genus or species level..!)

Snaphshot from one of the workshops during the porject Polychaete diversity in Norwegian Waters (PolyNor)

Snaphshot from one of the workshops during the project “Polychaete diversity in Norwegian Waters” (PolyNor), which has been working a lot on MAREANO-collected material

Every station with physical biological sampling typically includes two grab samples, one or two RP-sledge drags, and one beam trawl. Combined with video and all sorts of geological and chemical data collected, this gives us a thorough insight to the biodiversity at the location. The samples collected by different gears are naturally also treated differently; you can see how they are split up in this figure:

IMR = Institute of Marine Research (Havforskningsinstituttet)

Now, any project – even one as extensive as MAREANO – does have a finite life span, whereas museum collections are (at least in theory) here for “eternity”. This means that we have to try and envision what material will be important not just right now, but also in the future – whilst we simultaneously deal with the constraints of limited time and space. It is not feasible to keep everything, but we do try our best to make sure that we keep that which is most important. The fact that MAREANO collects material not only in formalin (good for morphological studies), but also in ethanol (which – unlike formalin – enables us to do genetic analysis) is hugely important as we get the best of both worlds delivered – by the pallet!

Pallets of material

Buckets and buckets with sediment and animals

Filling up the car with precious cargo

$Sorting the bulk fractions by station until we process them$

Sorting the bulk fractions by station until we process them

Once we receive a shipment of material, we get to work – the identified animals are unpacked, and an assessment is done on how to proceed with them; catalogue them into the museum collection, interim catalogue them into our “project catalogue”, leave them untreated for now, catalogue and pass it on to researchers working on that particular group of animals, to include it in our current projects, or discard it.

The unsorted fractions require even more TLC; the first step is for us to separate the animals from the sediment – from there on it goes through much the same process as the identified critters. These unsorted (and mostly ethanol-fixed) samples have yielded many interesting finds, and will undoubtedly continue to do so! We have so far submitted over 1300 specimens collected by MAREANO to be DNA-barcoded through the NorBOL project, and this number will continue to rise.

Sorting identified polychaete samples to family before storage

Guest researchers come to work on the material, here is Julio from Spain, who examined bristle worms from the family Oweniidae

But why do we need to keep all this material? Isn’t it “done” once MAREANO has done their identification of the fractions that they process? Of course not!

This material is a veritable gold mine for scientists, and it keeps on giving; MAREANO in it self aggregates a huge amount of interesting data (see here, for instance).

However, there are still many animal species groups that are extremely difficult to identify and when specialists on specific groups get the chance to compare specimens from different regions of the world, they very often find that original taxonomic identifications have to be revised. There are many reasons for that. Specimens may simply be misidentified. The revising taxonomist may also discover that specimens of the same species are called with different names in different laboratories. With applications of DNA-techniques it may also became apparent that what was originally considered to be one widespread species is actually several different species that have to be described and named.

So there are at least two main reasons why museums are eager to access and store material from projects like MAREANO and MIWA. One is the fantastic opportunity to get fresh specimen for research. Another reason is to safeguard and document the physical objects that the data were based on and to offer open access to study the specimens for the scientific community of researchers in biodiversity. Taxonomic studies may take a lot of time to complete, and taxonomists are scarce – so new results will continue to emerge at erratic intervals.

Ampharete undecima. One of the tools used when describing a new species is the electron microscope, which allows us to take very detailed photographs of the animals. Photo: K. Kongshavn

Ampharete undecima. Photo: K. Kongshavn

Thus the collected material is – and will continue to be – invaluable to scientific community for many, many years to come. There are still many new species waiting to be discovered (such as the little polychaete Ampharete undecima (Alvestad et al 2014), or the Amphipod Halirages helgae (Ringvold & Tandberg 2014), and there is much, much more to be learned about the distribution, habitats and life history of the species that we do know.

Therefore we are both proud and grateful to play a part in the safekeeping of this valuable material, and hope that it will continue to bring exciting new knowledge!

References:

Alvestad T., Kongsrud J.A., and Kongshavn , K. (2014) Ampharete undecima, a new deep-sea ampharetid (Annelida, Polychaeta) from the Norwegian Sea . Memoirs of Museum Victoria 71:11-19 Open Access.

Ringvold, H & Tandberg, A.H. (2014) A new deepwater species of Calliopiidae, Halirages helgae
(Crustacea, Amphipoda), with a synoptic table to Halirages species from the northeast Atlantic http://dx.doi.org/10.5852/ejt.2014.98

-Katrine & Endre

(*For those wondering: MAREANO is short for Marine AREAl database for NOrwegian sea areas)

Door #22: The Heart of the Museum

Today’s topic is the collection of type specimens of invertebrates at the University Museum, the true heart of the collections.

Some of our ethanol-preserved type specimens

“Type specimens are the objective standard of reference for the application of zoological names. When a new species or subspecies is described, the specimen(s) on which the author based his/her description become the type(s) (Article 72.1). In this way names are linked to type specimens, which can be referred to later if there is doubt over the interpretation of that name.

Consequently types are sometimes referred to as “onomatophores” which means name bearers.”

– International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (IZN)

Wikipedia has neat page about type specimens, so we are borrowing some text from them: “Although in reality biologists may examine many specimens (when available) of a new taxon before writing an official published species description, nonetheless, under the formal rules for naming species (the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature), a single type must be designated, as part of the published description.

A type description must include a diagnosis (typically, a discussion of similarities to and differences from closely related species), and an indication of where the type specimen or specimens are deposited for examination.

The geographical location where a type specimen was originally found is known as its type locality.” Wikipedia

Zoological collections are maintained by institutions such as universities and museums. Ensuring that types are kept in good condition and made available for examination by taxonomists are two important functions of such collections. The particular specimen that the species description is based on is called the holotype.

Frequently the first description of a species was also based on additional individuals. These individuals are called paratypes and are supposed to reflect some of the morphological variability of the species. Our museum has accumulated about 1500 type specimens of (non-insect) invertebrates since the mid 18hundreds, but the number is not yet exact due to a dubious status of some of the oldest specimens. We are keeping those types that are preserved in liquid in a climate regulated room.

When the specimens have been mounted by the researcher on glass slides for microscopy, we are keeping those in special cabinets that are portable in case evacuation of the building should be necessary.

The type collections continue to grow as new species are being described, and new material is deposited in our care.

The Holotype of Chamaedrilus varisetosus, new species described by Martinsson et al. 2015 and one of several recent additions to the type collection of invertebrates in Bergen. (Photo: E.Willassen)

Screen-dump from the paper by Martinsson et al. (2015)

Type specimen on microscopy slides are kept in special cabinets. This shows the Holotype and Paratype of the small worm Chamaedrilus varisetosus, which was described for the first time by a group of Swedish and Italian researchers this year (Martinsson, Rota, Erséus (2015): ZooKeys 501: 1–14. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.501.9279) (Photo: E.Willassen)

When someone works on the taxonomy of a group of animals (be it on order, family, genus or species level) they will often need to re-examine the type material. This makes the type collection perpetually crucial for the research community – and a great responsibility for the Museum.

Jon, one of the PhD-students at BIO, examining the type specimens of the sponge Chondrocladia (Chondrocladia) michaelsarsi

Type specimen of Chondrocladia (Chondrocladia) michaelsarsi collected in 1910, described by Emily Arnesen in 1920 – you can find the species description here (pdf).

Door #21: A Norwegian oddity

In 1939 the Swedish malacologist Nils Odhner described the nudibranch Berghia norvegica based on two specimens collected at Frøya and Stjørna in the mouth of the Trondheimsfjord.

After its original description this species has been found very few times, the first of them by Hennig Lemche a Danish malacologist who in 1958 collected a single specimen, today housed at the Natural History Museum of Bergen (ZMBN 62033). The importance of this specimen, until recently the only one apparently available in museum collections, was demonstrated by its use in a systematics review of the genus Berghia recently completed by a team of Spanish and American researchers.

The original description of Berghia norvegica is fairly detailed, but was based on preserved specimens and therefore the colouration of this species remained elusive until very recently. For over half a century nothing was known about the colouration of this beautiful and unique animal and is only in 2011 and subsequent years that Berghia norvegica is finally rediscovered by divers and researchers participating in the NudiSafaris organized at Gulen in Sogn og Fjordane just north of Bergen.

These recent discoveries revealed the extreme beauty of this delicate animal and generated the first live images of this endemic and emblematic species of the Norwegian fauna, which we here illustrate with a photograph taken at Gulen on March, the 15^th of 2014 at 38 m deep and kindly made available by Kåre Telnes author of the website “The Marine Fauna and Flora of Norway”.

The sea slug Berghia norvegica, an endemic species from Norway. Photo: Kåre Telnes.

Suggested reading:

Carmona, L., Pola, M., Gosliner, T. M. & Cervera, J. L. 2014. The Atlantic-Mediterranean genus Berghia Trinchese, 1877 (Nudibranchia: Aeolidiidae): taxonomic review and phylogenetic analysis. Journal of Molluscan Studies, 80: 482–498.

Evertsen, J. & Bakken, T. 2013. Diversity of Norwegian sea slugs (Nudibranchia): new species to Norwegian coastal waters and new data on distribution of rare species. Fauna Norvegica, 32: 45–52.

Odhner, N.H. 1939. Opisthobranchiate Mollusca from the western and northern coasts of Norway. Det Kongelige Norske Videnskabernes Selskabs Skrifter, 1: 1–93.

The Invertebrate Collections

The University Museum of Bergen