Category Archives: Guests

My internship at the University Museum of Bergen (Alina)

Hi, I am Alina Lösing, a bachelor’s student from Germany with the great opportunity to join the Cnidaria and Ctenophora team from the University Museum of Bergen for a 6 weeks Internship. This experience was not only a chance to further strengthen my passion in marine biology but also very helpful to gain valuable insight into research and museum operations.

During my time at the museum, I had the chance to join various projects of Joan J. Soto-Angel, including POLE2POLE (Horizon 2020, MSCA) on bipolarity, and Artsprosjektet NoAH (Artsdatabanken) on Norwegian Arctic Hydrozoa. I even had the honor to contribute a small part to it! I focused mostly on the polyp of Stegopoma plicatile, a supposedly widely distributed species present also in both Arctic and the Antarctic waters.

On black background branching animals looking a bit like corals

Figure 1: Living specimen of Stegopoma plicatile collected during the OceanX cruise at 240 m depth (Pictures: Joan J. Soto-Angel)

The first step was to take pictures of the different specimens that were sampled and categorized as Stegopoma plicatile. Further I took pictures of many other species of Arctic hydrozoan polyps and hydromedusae. I learned some useful tricks with the camera while photographing the different species of polyps and medusae.

Part of the project is developing a reliable workflow which allows for a morphological distinction between polyps belonging to potentially different species previously defined molecularly from different areas worldwide. Therefore, I spent a lot of time working with the microscope collecting data which can be crucial to refining the morphological differences between different species. I measured length and width of 380 nematocysts!

The author working in the lab; seen using a microscope with camera on top, and holding a DSLR camera

Figure 2: Taking pictures of the samples with the microscope and the camera (Pictures: Joan J. Soto-Angel)

Furthermore, I underwent training in tissue sampling, a crucial step in preparing the samples for DNA sequencing. It’s all about preventing tissue contamination! Moreover, I had the opportunity to visit the DNA Lab, where I received instruction in their specialized techniques for DNA extraction, PCR, and electrophoresis. Many thanks Cessa for your time and dedication!

The highlights of my internship were of course both sampling trips I got to attend on board the Research Vessel Hans Brattstrøm. On the ship I learned a lot about the specific sampling methods for these incredibly delicate invertebrates. Despite experiencing a bit of seasickness the first time, I assisted with net deployment, sorting the animals, and collecting water samples from different depths.

Wrok on board the reserach wesse (person holding a transparent cylinder with water) and a group photo of the participants

Figure 3: Collecting water samples from a CTD; The Team during a successful sampling day (Pictures: Luis Martell, Praveen Raj)

Apart from an amazing Jellyfish Team, Bergen has many more attractions to offer. I highly recommend packing your hiking boots for your next visit, as the surrounding mountains offer breathtaking scenery. And if you share my passion for the ocean, a visit to the Nordnes Sjøbad is a must. Here you can take a refreshing dip in the frosty ocean before warming up in the heated saltwater pool.

Scenic shots of nature in Bergen

Figure 4: Hike to Ulriken and Fløyen with a view of Bergen (Pictures: Alina Lösing)

 I would like to take a moment to acknowledge Joan’s invaluable contribution to my internship at the University Museum of Bergen. Joan’s dedication and extensive knowledge have made my experience truly unforgettable.

-Alina

Student visits – Ellisiv and Maria

A guest post from two of our MSc students (in this case co-supervised with NTNU) who were here on a research visit for three weeks in January 2024. 

We are Maria Buhaug Grankvist and Ellisiv Tomasgard Raftevold, and for the past three weeks we have been visiting the University Museum in Bergen to work on our master’s projects. It’s been a lot of fun, a lot of hard work and very useful, as the Bergen University Museum really is the place to be when you’re working with marine invertebrates.

Both our theses focus on marine invertebrates, but two different phyla. Maria is working with cyclostomatid Bryozoans, while Ellisiv looks at Polychaetes. We write our masters for the NTNU University Museum in Trondheim in collaboration with the University Museum in Bergen and the projects “Digitization of Norwegian Bryozoa” (NorDigBryo) and “Marine Annelid Diversity in Arctic Norway” (ManDAriN). Keep reading, and you will learn about our projects and what we recommend to do when visiting Bergen!

Ellisiv’s marine annelids:
I’m Ellisiv and in my master’s thesis, I study a marine Annelid or Polychaete genus called Flabelligera within the family Flabelligeridae. Flabelligerids are mostly benthic and can be found from the intertidal zone down to the deep sea. They like living in the sand or mud, or under rocks, and they can be quite small and have sediment camouflage or a completely transparent body and outer sheath and may therefore be quite hard to find. If you do find them they are quite cool to look at, and if they are transparent, you can see their internal organs and green circulatory system. Their most prominent character is the cephalic cage, which is a circle of bristles around their mouths forming a kind of cage. In the ecosystem, these animals have an important role in that they for example eat the marine snow that falls to the bottom of the oceans so that it can be recycled back into the food chain.

Flabelligera affinis, a species within this genus was until recently thought to be only one species and was thought to have a worldwide distribution. This, however, was shown not to be true when Salazar-Vallejo 2012 restricted F. affinis to arctic areas and reinstated F. vaginifera which was previously synonymized with F. affinis, and proved that it was at least two different species sorted into one. Also looking at the material we have in the museum collections and DNA samples it was suspected that there are multiple different species sorted into F. affinis.

This is the problem I am trying to solve in my master’s thesis, and to do this I need to study the specimens found in the museum collections that are sorted to F. affinis and look at their different morphological characters and sort them into groups. This is mostly what I have done in Bergen. However, these species are very similar, and sequencing their DNA to look at their relatedness is a very useful addition to the morphology. Hopefully, I can get a step closer to solving this taxonomic confusion in my master’s and we can get to know how many species are hiding within Flabelligera.

Maria and the bryozoans:
I’m Maria, and for my master thesis I’m recording the diversity of bryozoan species within the order Cyclostomatida in Norwegian waters (meaning off the coast of Norway, the arctic ocean and some nearby areas). In addition to creating a checklist of recorded species, I’m mapping out their geographic and bathymetric distribution. In short, I’m trying to provide an answer to the question: What species of Cyclostomatida do we have, and where do they live?

There are two main reasons for studying this particular phylum in my thesis. First, they are strongly understudied, and according to a report published by the Norwegian Taxonomy Initiative in 2021, our understanding of bryozoan distribution and ecology is weak and unsatisfactory, even with “essential knowledge gaps” in some areas.
The second reason explains why it’s an issue that we know so little about these animals: They are majorly important for many marine ecosystems! Nearly all bryozoans are colonial, so even though the zooids (term for an individual animal in a colony) is only 0,1 – 0,5 mm long, the colonies can be as much as half a meter tall or wide! Many of the colonies have intricate shapes supported by heavily calcified structural zooids, providing habitats for a wide range of other animals. In this way, the bryozoans promote biodiversity in much the same way corals do, but they are far less known and barely protected by law like their coral counterparts.

To protect these beautiful colonial creatures we first of all need to know them better. Mapping the actual diversity and distribution of Norwegian bryozoans is far too large a task for a two year master thesis, but my thesis will hopefully contribute to the final results of the NorDigBryo project.

DNA sequencing
For both our theses we use an integrative approach, combining the morphology (what we see/the physical traits of the animals) with genetic sequence data. DNA sequencing is one of the things we got to do in Bergen, and it was very interesting to see how this is done from start to finish. We got to extract the DNA, use PCR and specific primers to amplify the DNA string of interest and gel electrophoresis to test if the prior methods worked.

For the successful sequences, we got to try the Sanger sequencing method, and it is very exciting to get to use some of our own sequences in our theses.

When in Bergen:
You’d might think that when we finish long days at the university museum, looking at marine invertebrates from dusk till dawn, we would go and do something completely different when the weekend comes. You’d be wrong!
In our spare time in Bergen, we went to see the University Museum of Natural History and were there almost from when it opened until it closed because there were so many interesting exhibitions. There are so many beautiful creatures on the planet, many of them and the story of how they evolved, you can learn about at the museum. We of course especially loved the “deep sea-room” where we would sit for a long time while watching a cephalopod swimming around deep sea sulfur vents..soothing.

More about the projects:
Marine Annelid Diversity in Arctic Norway (ManDAriN) home page (UiB)
ManDAriN presented at Artsdatabanken

Digitization of Norwegian Bryozoa (NorDigBryo) home page (UiO)
NorDigBryo presented at Artsdatabanken
NorDigBryo is also on Instagram – give us a follow!

-Ellisiv & Maria

It was our pleasure hosting these two enthusiastic guests, and we wish them luck in the thesis work – stay tuned for updates! 

PS: Interested in a marine master thesis at the University Museum of Bergen? Check out the blog detailing potential projects, or get in touch with the staff listed!

Student visit – Ana González

MSc student Ana González visited the collections last month as part of project NorHydro, where she spent some weeks in the lab working with her samples. Here is an account of her experience:

The challenge of identifying benthic hydrozoans
Hydrozoa is a fascinating but poorly understood group of invertebrates, in part because their identification is not always an easy task. I have been studying benthic hydrozoan communities for over a year now, in particular those living in the shallow waters of Mallorca (Spain), and I have realized that the diversity of forms and structures in the group is higher than I had imagined at the beginning of my studies, and their identification is more difficult than I expected. The assemblages of hydrozoans in the Mediterranean are of course very different from the ones that occur in Norway, but something that both communities have in common is that morphological identification of the animals (i.e. telling which species is present based only on the characteristics we can observe) is challenging, which is why one of the aims of my visit to the University Museum of Bergen last December was to learn a different technique (DNA barcoding) that can help me improve the identification of my samples in cases when the morphology of the specimens is not good enough.

Some of the morphological characters that are used to identify benthic hydrozoans. On the left side a member of Campanulariidae, with a stolonal colony, and on the right side Monotheca obliqua with an erect colony.

DNA barcoding consists in finding a short DNA sequence (the barcode) that is similar for all members of one species but different from all other species. It is a relatively recent tool that –among other things– has helped the scientific community identify specimens that for one reason or the other cannot be identified based on how they look. In some groups, such as many colonial invertebrates, this technique has become a key asset because the colonies are often too young or not reproductive, or the important characters for identifications may be found only in one stage of the life cycle and not in others. For this visit I had the chance to bring all my samples from Mallorca to Bergen and I set to extracting the DNA of selected specimens, amplifying two different barcode genes (COI and 16S), and obtaining clean sequences for them. I discovered that, when it comes to DNA barcoding, every step of the process is important, and being patient and careful is essential.

Me at the DNA lab, running the electrophoresis for my samples.

Getting good results in the DNA lab depends on several factors like not forgetting any step and avoiding contamination as far as possible, but the work does not end there: once you have your sequences they have to be cleaned, quality-checked, and finally compared with others. This means that having a complete and trustworthy database of DNA barcodes is necessary, especially if you want to use the sequence to help you corroborate the identification of a specimen. When done right and with a good database, the DNA barcodes can be useful to detect differences between hydrozoan assemblages growing in different parts of the world or between different substrates and levels of anthropogenic impact, which is what I am doing in my MSc project.

Left: Clytia sp growing on the marine plant Posidonia oceanica. Center: A polyp of Halecium sp, one of the most difficult genera of Hydrozoa to identify based only in morphology, especially when the colony is not reproductive. Right: Eudendrium sp., found in harbours in Mallorca in high abundances.

The analysis of DNA sequences is a powerful tool to compare specimens of distinct populations and in some cases animals that apparently belong to the same species turn out to be completely different (e.g. cryptic species). This is not uncommon for benthic hydrozoans, which have high morphological diversity but also high levels of plasticity, resulting in colonies from different species sometimes being very similar to each other when they grow in similar substrates. As useful as DNA analyses are, however, it is also important to consider their limitations. For example, while the abundance of each species in a given community is important to describe the ecological status of a habitat, estimating abundance is still not always possible from sequence reads in DNA analyses.

Many cryptic species have been discovered in Aglaopheniidae thanks to the combination of DNA barcoding and morphological analysis

The use of DNA barcodes in my work is not limited to my current project, as I hope my identifications and sequences will help a little bit to improve the databases for future studies of hydrozoan communities in the Mediterranean Sea, and maybe even allow other researchers to compare their samples with the species found on other parts of the world. I think that looking closely at each specimen is the best way to truly know variation, so both morphology observations and DNA analyses should be combined to obtain good estimates of the diversity of a taxon in any locality. For example, whenever the DNA analyses reveal differences in two clades that were thought to be the same species, it is time to search for new taxonomic characters that we might have missed before, and for that reason it is also important to have a good knowledge of the morphology of each species. Both morphological and DNA-based identifications have limitations and advantages so, if you have the opportunity to use both, why choose only one?

Ana

Research internship – Carla García Carrancio

On summer 2021 I had the opportunity to conduct a research visit at the University Museum of Bergen under project NorHydro. Concretely, I was working with the hydrozoan collections, where I got to know first-hand the role played by the curators and the importance of the collections. I examined several specimens and digitalized their associated data creating e-vouchers. Having all the information of specimens in a digital format is very important because it allows other researchers to access the material without having to come to the museum and helps to make the inventory more accessible and organised. I also improved my knowledge of hydrozoan diversity by identifying numerous specimens deposited at the museum. For that, I used some keys for both thecate and athecate hydroids from North—West European waters as well as the guidance of my MSc supervisor Luis Martell.

The main difference between leptothecate and anthoathecate hydroids is the lack of theca in the latter (the theca is a cup-like structure that protects the polyps), but some of them can be very tricky to identify since anthoathecate hydroids may have theca-like structures, and the theca of lepthothecate polyps may be difficult to see at first sight. Also, when you look at a sample, you may found several hydrozoans growing on the same substrate all together, making identification even more difficult. One of the characteristics used to differentiate species is the presence and the shape of the reproductive structures (gonophores), but they are not always present if the polyps are not reproductive.

Sertularella rugosa (top row) is without a doubt one of my favourite hydrozoans. The hydrothecae resemble a bee hive and the colony has a zig-zag appearance. However, it is easy to confuse it with Sertularella tenella (bottom row). Pictures credits: Carla García.

Polyps of the family Campanulariidae. This common family is characterized by the presence of a bell-shaped theca. Pictures credits: Carla García.

During my stay, I also had the chance to go sampling on a research boat, which helped me to understand better the procedures and requirements that are necessary to collect hydrozoans. We used a wide-mouthed plankton net that went up and down at a constant speed to avoid damaging the jellies and other gelatinous organisms from the plankton. After sampling, we took the cod-end to the laboratory. There, the content of the cod-end was poured on a light table. Then, we selected interesting specimens (including hydromedusae belonging to genus Euphysa) with wide mouthed pipettes and transferred them to Petri dishes filled with fresh seawater to observe them better under a microscope.

Towing the plankton-net which went down to 650m to capture some gelatinous organisms. As you can imagine, going up and down such a long distance takes a lot of time, but it is never boring with colleagues like Aino Hosia (right). Picture credits: Carla García.

I was lucky enough to get samples of Euphysa aurata and Euphysa sp., but they did not want to pose for my photo and kept moving around. Picture credits: Carla García.

We took the opportunity to collect some shallow-water benthic hydroids just in front of the Marine Station. Picture credit: Carla García.

Last but not least, I worked at the DNA lab, which allowed me to gain experience in new molecular techniques that I had not used before and to adapt myself to different (and very modern) facilities.

This experience has been simply great for me. I loved the working environment and the fact that everybody was always there to give me a hand. I have learned a lot and I am taking with me many friends that I hope to meet again when I come back to Bergen.

If you want to know more about projects of NorHydro and HYPNO, visit NorHydro’s home page and Facebook page, and check the hashtags #HYPNO and #NorHydro inTwitter.

               

-Carla García-Carrancio

Research Internship – Francesco

In the last part of 2019 Francesco Golin collaborated with us as an intern in project NorHydro. Francesco is a student at the University of Algarve, where he is enrolled in the International Master of Science in Marine Biological Resources (IMBRSea). We asked him about his internship and this is what he told us:

During the 2019 autumn semester I joined Luis Martell and Aino Hosia in project NorHydro as a research intern. My research contribution was aimed at finding how many species of the hydrozoan genus Euphysa are present in Norwegian waters, and how to define them morphologically and genetically. Euphysa is a common genus with 22 accepted species, but many of them are not easy to tell apart from each other, which is why we decided to implement an integrative approach for species delimitation including morphological and molecular analyses.

Some of the species of Euphysa occurring in Norway. From left to right: Euphysa aurata, Euphysa flammea, and Euphysa sp

Working on board during the cruise

My first mission as an intern was collecting some samples of Euphysa and other gelatinous organisms. Luckily, the opportunity to do so presented itself during the student cruise associated to BIO325, a course in which I participated as part of my studies at UiB.

During this cruise I used a light table to spot the tiny jellyfishes brought on board by the Multinet, then I placed them on a Petri dish and took pictures of them with a camera attached to a stereomicroscope, before transferring them to an Eppendorf tube filled with ethanol.

All these elements (the pictures of each organism, the associated sampling data, and the samples themselves) are needed for species delimitation of hydromedusae. The pictures are used to compare the morphology of different individuals and to identify important diagnostic characters (unfortunately, ethanol-fixed jellyfish are not useful for morphological analysis), while the ethanol-preserved samples are used to obtain DNA sequences.

The light table used to spot the gelatinous zooplankton

Some siphonophore parts are very transparent, and thus they are some of the most difficult animals to spot in plankton samples.

The hydrozoan Aglantha digitale (left) was very abundant in all my samples. Other cnidarians, such as this anthozoan larva (right) were also present.

My second mission consisted on gathering the original descriptions of the different species of Euphysa. This information is necessary if we want to understand what makes each species different, and will come handy when analyzing the individuals and their pictures collected on the field. Talking about species boundaries, I had the opportunity to attend a course on “Molecular Species Delimitation” offered by the University Museum. In this course I learned how to perform the analysis of DNA sequences for species delimitation, using some common software (MEGA and R) for this purpose. These are important tools that will allow us to assess the diversity of Euphysa in Norway, and together with the morphological analyses these data will help us determine if new species have to be described.

Now the semester has ended and my internship is over. Nevertheless, I hope my help was meaningful, as I want to continue being a part of this research project in the future. I will keep myself updated with the changes in the taxonomy of Euphysa, so I’m sure I will be able to join NorHydro again when I’ll come back to Bergen!

-Francesco

Workshop week at Espegrend field station

The final week of March was teeming with activity, as no less than three Norwegian Taxonomy Projects (Artsprosjekt) from the Invertebrate Collections arranged a workshop and fieldwork in the University of Bergen’s Marine biological field station in Espegrend.

The projects – Sea Slugs of Southern Norway(SSoSN), Norwegian Hydrozoa (NorHydro) and Invertebrate fauna of marine rocky shallow-water habitats: species mapping and DNA barcoding (Hardbunnfauna) fortunately overlap quite a bit in where and how we find our animals (as in, Cessa’s seaslugs are eating the organisms the rest of us are studying..!), and so it made sense that we collaborated closely during this event.

That meant more hands available to do the work, more knowledge to be shared – and definitely more fun! All projects had invited guests, mostly specialists in certain groups, but also citizen scientists, and our students participating. We stayed at the field station, which has excellent facilities for both lodging and lab work.

Participants on our Artsprojects workshop in March. Left from back: Peter Schuchert, Manuel Malaquias, Bjørn Gulliksen, Jon Kongsrud, Tom Alvestad, Gonzalo Giribet. Middle row from left: Heine Jensen, Luis Martell, Endre Willassen, Eivind Oug, Front row from left: Katrine Kongshavn, Cessa Rauch and Jenny Neuhaus (Photo: Heine Jensen)

The fieldwork was carried out in the Bergen region, and was done in various ways. We had the R/V “Hans Brattstrøm” available for two days, where we were able to use triangular dredges, plankton net, and grab to sample.

Other days we used a small boat from the station to go to the islands close to Espegrend to examine the tide pools and tidal belt. We also went to local marinas and scraped off what was living on the piers, and a brave soul donned her wet suit and went snorkeling, which enabled us to sample very specific points of interest (“take that green thing over there!”).

We are fortunate here in Bergen in that we have a very active local student dive club, SUB-BSI, whose divers kindly kept an eye out for – and even collected – some of our target animals, as well as sharing their photos of the animals in their natural habitat, all of which is amazing for our projects!
We gave short presentations of each of the projects at SUB in the beginning of the week, and invited the divers out to the lab to on the following Thursday to show some of the things we are working on. It was a very nice evening, with a lot of interested people coming out to look at our critters in the lab. We also decimated no less than 14 homemade pizzas during that evening – learning new stuff is hard work!

Guests in the lab (photos K. Kongshavn)

All together, this made it possible for us to get material from an impressive number of sites; 20 stations were sampled, and we are now working on processing the samples.

The locations where we samples during the week (map: K. Kongshavn)

We are  very grateful to all our participants and helpers for making this a productive and fun week, and we’ll make more blog posts detailing what each project found – keep an eye out for those!

You can also keep up with us on the following media:

 NorHydro: Hydrozoan Science on Facebook, and Twitter #NorHydro

@Hardbunnsfauna on Instagram and Twitter

SeaSlugs: on Instagram and in the Facebookgroup

 –Cessa, Luis & Katrine

Guest Researcher: Joan

Dr Joan Soto from the University of Valencia (Spain), visited us at the museum during August/September 2017 to collaborate with HYPNO on the mysterious issue of linking hydroids and their medusae. We asked him about his experience, and got the following:

Joan, ready to go jelly-hunting under the blue sky!

Joan, ready to go jelly-hunting under the blue sky!

Imagine a caterpillar and its butterfly described as different species by the scientific community. Now think on how confusing it would be if everybody kept calling them with different names over centuries. Well, this is the case of many hydroids and their corresponding medusae!

Hydrozoans, together with other well-known animals such as corals, anemones and jellyfishes, are included within the Phylum Cnidaria. Most hydrozoans are metagenetic, which means that they alternate between asexual (the polyp, usually benthic) and sexual (medusae, usually pelagic) stages in their life. Since the early works by Linnaeus in the mid-18th century, the very first scientists who showed interest in hydrozoans specialized primarily in a single stage of their life cycle, often neglecting the other, and even those courageous scientists who accepted the challenge of studying both groups were unable to discover the correspondence between such different animals as the polyp and the medusa.

Nowadays, in the era of molecular tools, new techniques are revealing that things are not what they seem, neither do they look like what they really are. Thanks to project HYPNO, several links between polyps and medusae have been found, with the subsequent adjustment in their ID (a.k.a. their scientific name), but that is not all! New evidences are bringing to light that some hydrozoans, even if they are morphologically identical to each other, in reality belong to different species, a fact known as “cryptic species”.

Both of these phenomena may be involved in the taxonomic confusion surrounding the hydroid Stegopoma plicatile and the medusa Ptychogena crocea, the former a worldwide reported species, the latter a Norwegian endemism. How can a medusa be so restricted in distribution while its hydroid lives everywhere? Perhaps now we know the answer thanks to molecular tools: Stegopoma plicatile may represent a complex of species, hiding a misunderstood diversity, and similar S. plicatile hydroids may produce different Ptychogena medusae. In other words, perhaps the polyp does not have such a wide distribution, and records from other parts of the world should be re-examined in detail, paying special attention to the tiniest and easily overlooked details of its morphology. But of course this is a job only for very patient detectives…

Hydroids of Stegopoma plicatile (like this one) from all over the world look very similar to each other, but may produce very different medusae.

Hydroids of Stegopoma plicatile (like this one) from all over the world look very similar to each other, but may produce very different medusae.

These beautiful medusae of Ptychogena crocea collected in Korsfjord were sexually mature. You can see the four gonads as folded masses of yellow tissue in each jellyfish.

These beautiful medusae of Ptychogena crocea collected in Korsfjord were sexually mature. You can see the four gonads as folded masses of yellow tissue in each jellyfish.

Thus, this was the objective of my recent visit to the Bergen University Museum. An outstanding month surrounded by enthusiastic scientists, amazing landscapes, restricted doses of sun, and upcoming challenges: we trust that current and future analyses combining both molecular and morphological taxonomy will lead to settle the correspondence of Stegopoma hydroids with other Ptychogena-like medusae from all over the globe, or even to the description of new species to science!

Deploying the net with help of the crew from RV "Hans Brattstrøm"

Deploying the net with help of the crew from RV “Hans Brattstrøm”

Team-work during the sampling makes everything a lot easier!

Team-work during the sampling makes everything a lot easier!

The amazing crane of the RV "Hans Brattstrøm" allowed us to efficiently hunt for jellyfish at the fjords.

The amazing crane of the RV “Hans Brattstrøm” allowed us to efficiently hunt for jellyfish at the fjords.

This is what our samples look like when we finally get to look at them on board

This is what our samples look like when we finally get to look at them on board

-Joan

Alien species

Collaborative work between the University of Rostock and the Natural History Museum of Bergen

Prof Wolfgang Wranik (yellow coat) sampling in 2015

Prof Wolfgang Wranik (yellow coat) sampling in 2015

Professor Wolfgang Wranik from the University of Rostock in Germany has visited the Natural History Museum during the 13-14th of June to work on a recently detected invasion of an American species of haminoid gastropods observed in southern Scandinavia and the western Baltic Sea.

The species is apparently already reproducing and established in the area, but it is unknown when and how did it make is way across the Atlantic.

A combination of DNA and fine morphological data using scanning electron microscopy is being employed to compare specimens from both side of the Atlantic and confirm the identity of the European specimens.

Animal from Tjärnö, Sweden observed in January 2017.

Animal from Tjärnö, Sweden observed in January 2017.

Global warming is facilitating the spread of southern species into higher latitudes, and the role of shipping and aquaculture activities in re-shaping the distribution of many marine species is well documented. Among haminoids there is fear that a Pacific species established in the Mediterranean Sea since the 1990s (Haminoea japonica) is already displacing the native fauna of molluscs, which raises concerns about the possible impact of the US haminoid in our local environments. 

Manuel Malaquias, Natural History Museum of Bergen, UiB

Update from the Annelida-course

20170609_100827

As told last week, we are currently hosting the international course on Annelid Systematics, Morphology and Evolution at the University of Bergen’s field station. Here’s a little update of what we have been up to since the previous post:

The days are pretty packed, with lectures, sampling, and lab work – thankfully both students and teachers are enjoying the work, and the mood in the lab is sunny (even if the Bergen “summer” is somewhat…fickle these days). We have covered a multitude of research topics, methods,  habitats, and annelid groups so far, with still more to come.

Happy, hard working students in the lab

Happy, hard working students in the lab

"summer" sampling - we did get very nice samples!

“summer” sampling – we did get very nice samples!

Back in the lab, Torsten explaining todays exercises

Back in the lab, Torsten explaining todays exercises

Mixing the solution to get the tiny annelids out

Mixing the solution to get the tiny annelids out

The jaws of a small Ophryotrocha

Pointing out the jaws of a small Ophryotrocha

We’ll keep blogging from the from the course, so check back!

You can also get some glimpses of the exciting world of Worm researchers (!) by checking the tag #annelidacourse2017 on Twitter (you don’t need an account to do that, just click the link).

International Course on Annelid Systematics, Morphology and Evolution

The two-week long International Course on Annelid Systematics, Morphology and Evolution is up and running at the Espegrend Marine Biological Station!

The course is held by the University Museum of Bergen in cooperation with the Moscow State University and ForBio (Research School in Biosystematics). It is sponsored by SPIRE (Strategic Programme for International Research and Education) and SIU (Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Education). More info about the course can be found here.

Twenty students and eighteen course organizers and instructors from Norway, Russia and 10 more countries are participating in the course, which is being held in the University of Bergen’s marine research station at Espegrend.

lectures

Conrad (top) and Ken giving presentations

The course has started with a lecture on basic concepts in phylogenetics and evolution following by Endre Willassen, followed by the talks on phylogeny of Annelida by Ken Halanych (Auburn University) and Conrad Helm (Sars Centre).

boat

R/V Hans Brattstrøm, on the road With sampling gear, and enthusiastic sorting in the lab

We have been samplingwith both R/V Hans Brattstrøm and the smaller boat Aurelia in several benthic biotopes in the vicinity of the station, and have collected plenty of serpulids and siboglinids among other worm families.

The first laboratory session focused on Sabellida and Siboglinidae and were taught by Maria Capa (NTNU), Nadya Rimskaya-Korsakova (MSU) and Glafira Kolbasova (MSU). Nadya has brought few large vestimentiferans from the Moscow collection and the students got the opportunity to look at famous hydrothermal vent tubeworms.

Samples-both brought from Russia, and caught locally - the live specimens are stored in the cold room , and we suffer a little when we og to get them..!

Samples-both fixated specimens brought from Russia, and live ones caught locally – the live specimens are stored in the cold room , and we suffer a little when we og to get them..!

We’ll be blogging more from the from the course, so check back! You can also get some glimpses of the exciting world of Worm researchers by checking the tag #annelidacourse2017 on Twitter.