Category Archives: Photography

A week of worms in Wales!

Does that not sound appealing?
It was actually a lovely event!

The IPC2016 logo © National Museum Wales

The 12^th International Polychaete Conference took place in Cardiff, Wales during the first week of August. These events have been taking place every third year since 1981, and the previous one was in Sydney, Australia in 2013.

Polychaetologists assembled on the steps of the National Museum Cardiff (c) IPC2016

Polychaetologists anno 2016 assembled on the steps of the National Museum Cardiff © National Museum Wales

During an intensive week of presentations and posters spanning topics within Systematics, Phylogeny, Ecology, Methodologies, Biodiversity, Biodiversity and Ecology, Morphology, Reproduction & Larval Ecology, Development, and Polychaete studies, people had the chance to showcase their work, and learn more about what others are working on. The local organising committee invited us to “Have a happy conference, re-connecting with those already known, meeting correspondents for the first time, ans making new connections and new friends” – and I think we can safely say that the mission was accomplished!

Cardiff – and the National Museum Wales – was an excellent venue for “polychaetologists” from all over the globe.

Snapshots of Cardiff (photos: K.Kongshavn)

In all we were 190 attendees from about 30 countries present – including a sizeable Norwegian group! Some of us (below) gave talks, and most were also involved in posters. Results and material from large projects and surveys such as PolyNor (Polychaete diversity in Nordic Seas), MAREANO (Marine AREA database for NOrwegian waters), NorBOL (The Norwegian Barcode of Life), and MIWA (Marine Invertebrates of West Africa) were all well incorporated in the Norwegian contributions.

: Torkild

: Nataliya

: Martin

: Katrine

There were in fact a lot of contributions involving one or more collaborators from a Norwegian institution (UM, NTNU, NIVA, The SARS center, NHM Oslo, Akvaplan-NIVA ++) being presented during the conference. It is really nice to see that the community is growing through recruitment of both students and international researchers.

Norwegian delegates lining up in the City Hall before the start of the banquet

As Torkild said in his excellent blog post (in Norwegian, translation by me):

Pins marking where participants come from – this was not quite completed when the photo was taken, but none the less..well represented!

With so many active participants in the field, a lot of exciting research is being carried out in Norway. Not only do we have many projects – large and small – running at our institutions involving our “regular” Norwegian collaborators; there is also a significant proportion of international participation in these projects.

Furthermore, our activities enable researchers from all over the world to visit or loan from our scientific collections, and study the substantial (new) material that the projects are generating. It is nice to see that our efforts are being recognized in the international community! The recent flurry of activities has been well aided by the Norwegian Species Initiative (Artsprosjektet) (and the MIWA-project at UM).

The majority of our research is based on, or incorporates, museum material from our collections. The collections have been built over years, decades and even centuries, and continue to increase in scientific value as new science is added.

It is gratifying to see the material being used, and we hope it will gain even more attention in the aftermath of the conference.

From the poster session – these are some (!) of the posters we were involved in (photos: K.Kongshavn)

The University Museum was well represented, both in attendance, and in contributions. Below is a list of what we (co-)authored, presenting author is in bold, and University Museum people are in italics. We plan on posting some of the posters here, so stay tuned for that!

Presentations:

Giants vs pygmies: two strategies in the evolution of deep-sea quill worms (Onuphidae, Annelida)
Nataliya Budaeva, Hannelore Paxton, Pedro Ribeiro, Pilar Haye, Dmitry Schepetov, Javier Sellanes, Endre Willassen
DNA barcoding contributing to new knowledge on diversity and distribution of Polychaeta (Annelida) in Norwegian and adjacent waters
Torkild Bakken, Jon A. Kongsrud, Katrine Kongshavn, Eivind Oug, Tom Alvestad, Nataliya Budaeva, Arne Nygren, Endre Willassen
Diversity and phylogeny of Diopatra bristle worms (Onuphidae, Annelida) from West Africa
Martin Hektoen, Nataliya Budaeva
Experiences after three years of automated DNA barcoding of Polychaeta
Katrine Kongshavn, Jon Anders Kongsrud, Torkild Bakken, Tom Alvestad, Eivind Oug, Arne Nygren, Nataliya Budaeva, Endre Willassen

Posters

Diversity and species distributions of Glyceriformia in shelf areas off western Africa
Lloyd Allotey, Akanbi Bamikole Williams, Jon Anders Kongsrud, Tom Alvestad, Katrine Kongshavn, Endre Willassen
Eclysippe Eliason, 1955 (Annelida, Ampharetidae) from the North Atlantic with the description of a new species from Norwegian waters
Tom Alvestad, Jon Anders Kongsrud, Katrine Kongshavn
Phylogeny of Ampharetidae
Mari Heggernes Eilertsen, Tom Alvestad, Hans Tore Rapp, Jon Anders Kongsrud
Ophelina (Polychaeta, Opheliidae) in Norwegian waters and adjacent areas – taxonomy, identification and species distributions
Jon Anders Kongsrud, Eivind Oug, Torkild Bakken, Arne Nygren, Katrine Kongshavn
Pista Malmgren, 1866 (Terebellidae) from Norway and adjacent areas
Mario H. Londoño-Mesa, Arne Nygren, Jon Anders Kongsrud
Lumbrineridae (Annelida, Polychaeta) from Norwegian and adjacent waters with the description of a new deep-water species of Abyssoninoe
Eivind Oug, Katrine Kongshavn, Jon Anders Kongsrud
Nephtyidae (Polychaeta, Phyllodocida) of West African shelf areas
Ascensão Ravara, Jon Anders Kongsrud, Tom Alvestad
Phylogeny of the family Maldanidae based on molecular data
Morten Stokkan, Jon Anders Kongsrud, Endre Willassen

We had a mid-week excursion where we got to see a bit more of our hosting country; namely the impressive Caerphilly Castle constructed in the 13th century and still looking magnificent today, and a lovely lunch at the Llanerch wineyard with time for informal mingling and catching up.

Caerphilly Castle (photo: K.Kongshavn)

Note the red dragon in the Castle wall; this is the dragon of the Welsh flag. The story goes something like this (according to Wikipedia, at least!): From the Historia Brittonum,^[2] written around 830 a text describes a struggle between two serpents deep underground, which prevents King Vortigern from building a stronghold. This story was later adapted into a prophecy made by the wizard Myrddin (or Merlin) of a long fight between a red dragon and a white dragon. According to the prophecy, the white dragon, representing the Saxons, would at first dominate but eventually the red dragon, symbolising the Britons, would be victorious.

Being museum people (er..? People employed at a museum, I mean!) ourselves, we made sure to visit the exhibitions as well, and especially the new “Wriggle!” exhibition, which is all about..worms! Lots of fun, and a*a lot* of information packed in. Make sure to visit it, if you get the chance!

Visiting the “Wriggle!” exhibition during the Ice Breaker event

The attendants have also been busy on Twitter, visit @IPC2016 or check #IPC12Cardiff for loads of photos and on-the-spot-commentaries

Finally, we would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to the arranging committee – DIOLCH!

Cheers, Katrine

ps: Dw i’n hoffi mwydod!

Happy International Polychaete Day!

Last year we celebrated the first ever International Polychaete Day, and you can revisit our blog post here.

The celebration was initiated as a way to commemorate Kristian Fauchald, a key figure in the polychaetologist community for many years – as as a way for us to show off the cool critters that we work with!

You can read more about Polychaetes and what makes them so important on the invertebrate blog of the Smithsonian National Museum on Natural History

The day is being celebrated all over the globe, and many of the contributions are being collected as a “Storify” feature on Twitter, you can view them here: Storify

On both Twitter and Facebook the tags #PolychaeteDay and #InternationalPolychaeteDay are being used – check it out!

Happy World Oceans Day

Today, June 8th, is the World Oceans Day, and of course we should celebrate the big old blue!

In wind or calm, with nice substrate or impossible-to-wash-clay samples, in rain and in sun – we love it! (photos: K.Kongshavn)

Join in on the celebrations with #WorldOceansDay

My, what big teeth you have!

If not big, then certainly many!

Pictured is a Goniada multidentata (you guessed it, “many toothed”!), photographed in a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). The lower photo has been coloured afterwards to better show the placement of the teeth.

Don’t worry though, the whole animal is only a few millimetre long, so you are not on its menu!

The species was first described in the yearbook of Bergen Museum (now the University Museum of Bergen) in Arwidsson, Ivar. (1899). Studien über die Familien Glyceridae und Goniadidae. Bergens Museums Aarbog. 1898(11): 1-69, plates I-IV., which is available online at http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/130141#page/257/mode/1up

This specimen was collected by the R/V “Dr. Fridtjof Nansen” and has been identified as part of our MIWA – Marine Invertebrates of Western Africa – project. We’re working on a poster on the diversity of Glyceridae and Goniadidae of the region that will be presented at the 12th International Polychaete Conference in Wales this summer.

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

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 #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 #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