Category Archives: NorAmph

Seaweeds continued

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!

: Pelvetia canaliculata

: Ceramium cf virgatum

: Ulva lactua

: Fucus serratus

: Chaetomorpha aerea/linum

: Chylocladia verticilliata

: Delesseria sanguinea

: Plocamium lyngbyanum

: Stealth zoology; Aplysia punctata

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!

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

Amphipod-Thursday. WoRMS – (all) about amphipods

It is a sad fact, but a fact nonetheless. Most biologists are not taxonomists. Even so – the work many biologists do is based on knowing the species studied, and knowing the correct name is part of that important knowledge.

Screenshot from WoRMS-search: Andaniopsis lupus

But how do we know what names are valid, and what species have been formally described within a group? Taxonomic revisions tend to have name-changes as a result, and new species are described all the time – for amphipods an average of 140 species new to science are described yearly…

Screenshot from World Amphipoda Database

This is where databases will be your best friend! For marine species, the World Record of Marine Species, WoRMS, database is used widely, with more than 200 000 visits every month. Here you can find not only current accepted names, but also information about synonymised names, taxonomic literature, and for some species information about distribution, ecological traits and links to other resources. The data have all been checked and edited by a world-wide team of taxonomic and thematic editors – all responsible for their special groups of organisms.

: Tammy and Mike getting ready for action! Photo: AHS Tandberg

: Thoughtful participants. Photo: AHS Tandberg

This week, 22 of the 34 taxonomic editors of the World Amphipoda Database, feeding WoRMS with all Amphipod-related information, gathered at the Flanders Marine Institute in Oostende, Belgium to learn about how to best edit the information about Amphipods. It was two days full of information about the database, but also of hands-on training and with the help of the nice people in the Data Management Team of WoRMS, we managed to get quite a lot of information added and edited on the database. Needless to say, with more than 9000 amphipod species accepted (and several of them with earlier names or alternate representations), we have not completely finished yet. The work on editing a database is continuous – and we have plans for adding more info for each species, including type-information, ecological information and links to identification keys.

: Amphipodologists waiting for the harbour ferry. Photo: AHS Tandberg

: Sunset in Oostende. Photo: AHS Tandberg

The second best thing about going to workshops (the first being all the exciting new things we learn), is that we get to spend time with colleagues from far away. The people working on amphipods are in many ways my extended family – this is at least how it feels whenever we meet. News about both amphipods and life in general are exchanged, possible new projects are planned, and friendships continue to be reinforced over cups of coffee, early breakfasts and late dinners. And every time we leave each other, there is a hope that our next meeting might not be too far away. My colleagues from Poland call this “the Amphipoda way of life” – and this friendly, collaborate life is a good life to have as a researcher.

Participants at the workshop. Photo: AHS Tandberg (with help from ? at VLIZ)

Anne Helene

Citations:

Horton, T.; Lowry, J.; De Broyer, C.; Bellan-Santini, D.; Coleman, C. O.; Daneliya, M.; Dauvin, J-C.; Fišer, C.; Gasca, R.; Grabowski, M.; Guerra-García, J. M.; Hendrycks, E.; Holsinger, J.; Hughes, L.; Jaume, D.; Jazdzewski, K.; Just, J.; Kamaltynov, R. M.; Kim, Y.-H.; King, R.; Krapp-Schickel, T.; LeCroy, S.; Lörz, A.-N.; Senna, A. R.; Serejo, C.; Sket, B.; Tandberg, A.H.; Thomas, J.; Thurston, M.; Vader, W.; Väinölä, R.; Vonk, R.; White, K.; Zeidler, W. (2016) World Amphipoda Database. Accessed at http://www.marinespecies.org/amphipoda on 2016-04-07

WoRMS-info on workshop: http://www.marinespecies.org/news.php?p=show&id=4531

Thursday Amphipod — Norwegian Marine Amphipoda

Amphipoda is an order of mainly small crustaceans living in the ocean, in lakes and rivers, in caves and in moist soil. They can be found worldwide, and the last count in the marine speciesdatabase WoRMS gives about 9 800 valid species. Most of the amphipod species are marine, with again most species connected to the sea-floor (benthic) – even if one of the suborders entirely lives in the watercolumn (pelagic).

The Norwegian Species-name List includes 561 amphipods in Norway, and the most recent listing of amphipods in the North-East Atlantic includes 850 species (Vader, 2007). How many amphipod species that do live in Norwegian waters is probably somewhere between these two numbers.

A collection of Norwegian Amphipoda. Photo: Katrine Kongshavn

The Norwegian Species Initiative funded project “Norwegian Marine Amphipoda” (NorAmph) starting these days at the Universitymuseum has as one of its objectives to produce a better overview of what species are present in Norwegian marine waters. Utilising material from large projects such as MAREANO and GeoBio, from field-cruises with UNIS and not least the wonderful wealth of the Natural History Collections of the Universitymuseum of Bergen we hope to be able to give an answer to the question.

When a new species of any animal is described, it is mostly done on the basis of its morphology (how it looks). Lately we also add information about a small and species-specific part of the DNA, but for most species this is informations we don´t have yet. The project Barcode of Life aims to map this small part of every species´ DNA as a tool for later identification – like the barcodes that are used in shops. Norway is participating in this project through the national node NorBOL – and another of the objectives of the NorAmph project is to try to DNA-barcode as many of the norwegian marine amphipod-species as possible. You can read more about the NorBOL work at our invertebrate lab here at her museum here.

One very important part of the NorAmph project is to present the amphipods to all you not working on this fascinating group. Maybe you played with sandhoppers during a beach-holiday, or hunted for sideswimmers under the cobbles on a rocky shore? You might even have been flyfishing with a “Gammarus”-fly? Follow our “TangloppeTorsdag” (in Norwegian) or ThursdayAmphipod (in English) tag. Everything we post under this project will be collected under the category “NorAmph”.

Anne Helene

Literature:
Vader, W. 2007 A checklist of the Marine Amphipoda of the North-East Atlantic and Norwegian Arctic. Published on Tromsø Amphipod Webpage

Door #6: Associated Amphipods

Amphipods are a group of small crustaceans where most of the species we know are benthic (bottom dwelling) and marine. But within the benthic habitat there are many niches, and one of the more intriguing is the many ways of living on or inside another benthic animal. A few species become parasitic (feeding on their host), but for the most species living like this, it does not look like eating the host is the main objective. In these cases we term the amphipods as “associated with a host”.

To document some of these associations, I have had a wonderful cooperation with an amazing underwater photographer this year. Lill Haugen has photographed amphipods associated with hydroids, and sampled the amphipods afterwards for us. Documenting this kind of association is almost impossible without the help of divers – if we are lucky enough to sample a hydroid with our normal sampling gear, the amphipods fall off. It is not easy spotting these small animals for a diver either, but Lill says that it becomes easier with practice.

An amphipod family at home. Photo by Lill Haugen, all rights reserved

This photo is from the Oslofjord, at 25 m depth. With the photos from Lill we are able to say that this particular amphipod (from the family Stenothoidae) looks like it keeps the hydroid as a family home. The parents sit on the “stem” of the hydroid, and their children sit on the tentacles of the “flower”. This might be both to provide extra protection and food for the amphipod-children. The adult amphipods are 5mm long, their children 3mm.

Earlier studies have shown that amphipods of the family Stenothoidae often associate with molluscs – we have found several different species living inside bivalves (shells). Other amphipods might associate with other crustaceans such as crabs, or with sponges, anemones or snails (gastropoda).

For most amphipod species we know nothing about their life-history and possible associations. But the more we examine them, the more we learn..

Door #1: A day at sea

Welcome to our marine invertebrates December calendar! In Norway it is very common for children to have a Advent calendar of some sort to help shorten the wait towards Christmas.

We’ve decided to run with the idea here on the blog, giving you a tidbit about our work every day from December 1st to 24th.

We hope you’ll join us on our little venture – we can guarantee a varied selection of topics!

All the posts will be gathered under the Category 2015 December calendar

First out is a tale of sampling in the sleet…!

The scientific collections are the backbone of all the research performed at the University Museum – as it is at any museum. They hold treasures collected through the entire lifetime of a museum, and most times a collection was the reason for the establishment of a proper museum. The University Museum of Bergen is one of the oldest natural history collections in Norway, and we have grand collections.

But a collection needs to live – to be added to and to be used of – and this was the reason that bright and early Monday morning Katrine and Anne Helene were ready to go to sea. Our goal was to make a jumpstart at Anne Helenes new project about Amphipods (more about that in a later blog), and to take a grab (or two) of sandy seafloor to look for bristle worms (Polychaeta).

It is always a risk planning on a cruise in the very end of November, but this time the weather was on our side. Our plan – “go out and grab animals, sandy bottom is nice” – was cooked up in the spur of the moment when we got an offer for boat time late Friday afternoon (someone else had to change their plans in the last minute), and maybe that was why everything went so smoothly? Going out collecting benthic animals (those that live on the seafloor) is one of our favourite things, and so we didn’t need much prodding.

The grab and sledge performed beautifully, and now is the time for sorting and photographing live animals before adding them to the collection. Be sure to follow their story through later blogs – they will show up in the categories NorAmph and NorBOL, and maybe somewhere else as well?