Author Archives: katrine

Publications

Scientific publications: From leather bound tomes to printouts, taxonomic keys in frequent use, presentations and posters

We’ve compiled a list of recent (2013-present) publications by employees at the Invertebrate collections, and you can find it here (and as a tab at the top of the page)

A new polychaete species!

Meet Ampharete undecima, a new species of polychaete (bristle worm) that we recently described:

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

The sites where the species has been found

The species has been decribed based on material collected by the University of Bergen in the Nordic Seas in the 80s, and from samples collected by MAREANO in more recent years. It occurs in deep waters between 600 and 1650 meters depth, and has a broad distribution. The type specimen of the species is from a location that MAREANO sampled in 2009.

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.

Workshop aftermath

The lab is rather quiet today, compared with the frantic activity of last week – but there’s still plenty of work to do! We’ll catalog the identified material – several hundred entries – into our museum collections.

For NorBOL, a total of 250 polychaete specimens from 154 different species were selected for genetic barcoding, that’s pretty impressive! In addition, some of our participants selected material to loan with them, these will also in part become NorBOL-barcodes.

Samples, samples everywhere

We’ll process these as quickly as we can, taking pictures, filling in the forms and taking tissue samples for analysis at the CCDB lab in Canada – fingers crossed for a high success rate on the sequencing!

Preparing drawings using a camera lucida on the stereo microscope

As mentioned previously we focused on the MAREANO-material, but supplemented with other samples – including those that we have collected ourselves. That meant that beauties like this one (picture below) could be examined in detail by an expert, and get properly identified before we send it off to become part of the BOLD-database.

Previously Euchone sp, now we have it identified as Euchone analis

Thank you to all our participants for a very productive and fun week!

Workshop: Polychaete diversity in the Norwegian Sea

Our lab is currently brimming with polychaetologists (those working with the polychaeta, the bristle worms), as we’re in the middle of this year’s PolyNor workshop (Polychaete diversity in the Norwegian Sea).

The making of plans

Working hard

The Polychaete pack gathered

The colourful family Phyllodocidae is one of the groups we are working on

We have eleven participants (five nationalities) here, and all are working hard to assign names to animals, fill up our lists of material to be cataloged into the University Museum’s collections, accumulation data for their own research projects, and selecting material suitable for barcoding through the NORBOL-project.

Odontosyllis sp

A Paranaitis wahlbergi

A member of the family Sabellidae

The majority of the samples that we are working on have been collected through the MAREANO-programme, but we are supplementing with material collected around Bergen, closer to the coast and into the fjords, and material collected around Svalbard.

Collecting in the Oslofjord

The past week we’ve been staying at “Biologen”, a research station in the city Drøbak. The station is run by the University of Oslo, and we’ve been making day trips with the research vessel Bjørn Føyn collecting marine invertebrates using a variety of gear. During three days we managed to sample 19 localities, some of which were “type localities” of specific species that we were after. A type locality is the site where the specimen that the species description is based on was collected. Whenever possible, we want to include genetic barcoding of a specimen collected at the type locality. We also collected “a bit of everything” for barcoding, as we don’t have a lot of material that is suitable for genetic work from this region.

: “Biologen” (“the biologist”) where we were staying

: A Henricia spp on its way to becoming a barcode voucher

: Lovely conditions for field work!

: Happy researcher with a sponge

: Mountains of sediment, as per usual

: Checking the samples

: R/V Bjørn Føyn

: Washing samples

: The field station

: A pretty Sabellidae worm being prepared for barcoding

: One very happy researcher (he just found the isopod species he had come to look for)

: Sea urchins en masse

: Planning next days sampling

: We’re not letting the early dusk stop us

The 7th Congress of The European Malacological Societies

During the second week of September (7-11.09.14) the 7th Congress of The European Malacological Societies were held at St. Catherine’s College of the University of Cambridge, UK.

St. Catherine’s

The Colleges of Cambridge is a mashup of old venerable buildings and modern facilities, St. Catherine’s, founded in 1473, is no exception consisting of a brand new conference center and the main bulk of the college consisting of a quilt of buildings being pieced together since its founding, up to the 1900’s. The participants numbering around 150 researchers, converged on Cambridge from all around Europe, but also included travelers from more distant places like Vladivostok, Hong Kong and South Africa.

Talks in the Auditorium

As the Congress was not the largest, all the presentations were held in the same Auditorium and each day had its own topic, everybody got to experience all the talks, opposed to running around to find the most interesting symposium, leading to the participants to sit and learn about interesting topics and studies they most likely would have missed out on. The small number of researchers also led to a more intimate atmosphere and many discussions with people from widely different malacological fields and academic levels.

The University Museum was represented by two posters, presented by Trond Oskars and Lena Ohnheiser. Trond presented the remaining part of his master thesis, with a poster on the molecular phylogeny of the non-monophyletic Philiinidae cephalaspid gastropods and Lena presented a poster on the status of the cephalaspids Cylichna alba as a species or a complex of species.

Workshop on African invertebrates

We’re currently busy with a workshop on Marine Invertebrates of West Africa , look here for news on that:

MIWA-blog

Our field station at Espegrend, where we’re based

The Museum’s scientific cruise of 2014

R/V Håkon Mosby in Lysefjorden. photo: K.Kongshavn

R/V Håkon Mosby in Lysefjorden. photos: K.Kongshavn

We’ve spent the past couple of days out on the big ole’ blue, sampling along the south-western coast of Norway for bristle worms, worm molluscs, bubble snails and fish on board the research vessel “Håkon Mosby”.

We went from Bergen down to Lysefjorden in Rogaland, and had a highly productive trip. In total we sampled 30 stations using various kinds of gear (epibenthic sled, grab, net, trawl and triangular dredge) to capture our target animals.

This is a region that we have very little material from, and what we do have has been sampled in a way that makes it unsuitable for genetic work – so we went out to remedy that. Now the work begins with sorting and identifying the animals – but we already know that we have found some of the species that we were hunting for – so the cruise was definitely a success, and the scenery and weather made for a wonderful bonus!

Grab

Netting for fish in the littoral zone

Collecting in the littoral zone

Lab work onboard

No cruise without mud! This pile yielded three of the tiny snails one of our researchers was after; success!

Sorting in the lab

Trawl catch

RP-sledge in the sunset

Emptying the triangular dredge

Friday Photo: A beautiful feather duster worm!

For todays photo we have a real beauty; this bristle worm (Polychaeta) from the family Sabellidae, the feather duster worms!

After being emailed this photo, one of our collaborators – who works with the Sabellidae – has identified it to the genus Euchone (Thanks, M.! ).

For an identification to species level, an examination of small details, such as the characteristics of individual bristles would be needed. Or we can barcode it and hope that a specimen from the same species has already been (correctly!) identified to species and uploaded to the database, in which case we would get a hit on “our” barcode. In this case, we hope to do both – get a name on it based on the morphology, and do genetic sequencing so that its genetic barcode can be included in the BOLD database Euchone sp. Photo: K. Kongshavn

It was collected just outside of Bergen on one of our day trips, and will be included in our ongoing effort to assemble a library of genetic barcodes for all the Norwegian marine invertebrates.

Collecting around the island Sotra

We went out collecting with R/V “Hans Brattstrøm” again last Thursday, below is a small sample of the various animals that we collected. These will be used for genetic barcoding through the NorBOL project.