Tag Archives: barcoding

Final workshop for hyperbenthic copepods (HYPCOP)

Our first international workshop with from ltr; Anders Hobæk (NIVA), Cessa Rauch & Jon Kongsrud (UMB), Tone Falkenhaug (project leader, IMR), Alexandra Savchenko & Rony Huys (NHM), photo by Alexandra Savchenko

During the last week of September, HYPCOP organized its last and crucial workshop for finishing the project. We invited international collaborators Prof. Dr. Rony Huys and Dr. Alexandra Savchenko from the Natural History Museum in London. Prof. Dr. Huys is a well-known copepod taxonomist and crustacean researcher and published a multitude of species descriptions and books including key identification guides. We were very happy to hear he had time to come and travel to Bergen, paying us a visit while also helping us with species identifications of the many, many copepods we had collected during the two years of our project.

During the two years of the HYPCOP project we collected around 600 specimens from different localities all over Norway, including shallow coastal waters and the deeper parts of the mid-Atlantic Ridge (Loki’s Castle field of active hydrothermal vents). From all those specimens we extracted DNA from the soft tissue of the animal. Therefore, keeping the hard exoskeletons, for morphological identification downstream. This is the most time consuming and challenging part. The species can sometimes only be identified based on minuscule differences in the appearance of its legs. Besides, one needs good taxonomic competence to assign these differences to the thousands of marine benthic copepods species. And this is where the HYPCOP team needed help.

HYPCOP started in May 2020, when a lot of countries, including Norway, were in a lockdown and international travel was difficult or even impossible. Therefore, it was problematic for HYPCOP to invite international researchers for most of the time. Thus, we focused mostly on extracting DNA from our collected specimens and building up a barcode library. But what was missing was the nomenclature of the bulk of the specimens. When finally, our first international researchers could come and have a look at our specimens, it turned out to be an enormous task. With the help of Prof. Dr. Huys and Dr. Savchenko we managed now to have almost 300 assigned names to our DNA library of 500 specimens. Quite a few of those are new species and even new genera.

Kickoff of the workshop, which would take place at Marine Biological Station Espegrend for the duration of a week, photo by Alexandra Savchenko

Rony and Alexandra arrived Sunday evening in Bergen together with project leader Tone Falkenhaug and project technician Cessa. We were stationed at the Espegrend marine biological station in Bergen for the entirety of the week. It was for Tone and Cessa the first time they would finally meet Rony and Alexandra in person, after many months of digital communication. It was a nice relaxing first evening. The next day Anders Hobæk from NIVA and Jon Kongsrud from the UiB joined and we started off the week with a presentation overview of the project.

The overview informed everyone about the program of the week and the state of the art of the project. With the DNA barcode library, we managed to construct a COI phylogenetic tree. Some of the larger clades were already identified down to species level, but many more species names were missing from the smaller clades. It was up to us that week together with Rony and Alexandra to identify these last cases.

Alexandra onboard research vessel Emiliana, photo by Tone Falkenhaug

We also had one day of fieldwork planned, to have us work also with some fresh material. This we did with help of research vessel Emiliana and the Beyer’s sled. Both stationed at Espegrend Marine Biological station. We tried to pick out a nice and dry day for going out with the boat and that happened to be in the mid of the week. We went a little bit outside of the Biological Station, with a depth of around 90 – 120m. The Beyer’s sled is an epibenthic sampler, it is called a sled for its form. We got many fresh samples, but due the net being a little large in its mesh size, we did not get as many small species as we liked.

: Anders helping with the Beyer’s sled on board of r/v Emiliana, photo by Cessa Rauch

: Alexandra and Rony sieving the catch of the Beyer’s sled earlier that day, photo by Cessa Rauch

: Example of a DIY light trap; a bottle with a funnel as opening and a small LED light on the bottom, photo by Cessa Rauch

Therefore, we also tried another sampling method with help of Anders; he had brought with him a light trap. Light traps are very easy to DIY with a bottle and inverted bottle opening, like a funnel, and a small led light on the bottom. You install the trap in the water overnight; the little led light attracts a lot of small hyperbenthic and planktonic (and some bigger) species.

: The focus of the week was working on fixed material, but it is much more fun to work with freshly caught specimens, that still have their beautiful colors, photos by Alexandra Savchenko

Everyone working hard at the Marine Biological Station Espegrend, assigning species names to specimens, photo by Cessa Rauch

The entirety of the week consisted of many hours working at the microscope, going through literature, dissecting specimens, and assigning species names to the specimens. Eventually with help of Rony and Alexandra, we managed to assign 298 scientific names to 702 specimens in our collection. From those specimens, we extracted DNA from 593 specimens and produced a DNA library, which we uploaded to the BOLDSYSTEMS (Barcode of Life Data System). This library also has all the metadata of our specimens, such as location, depth, size, and pictures of the specimens (either life, fixed and in some cases parts). And it will be publicly available at the end of the HYPCOP project.

The week was demanding but very rewarding and we got many specimens identified, with even a few new species and genera to Norway and possibly new to science; all thanks to the hard work and help of Rony and Alexandra. We therefore also would like to take this opportunity to thank them again for their time and efforts in helping the HYPCOP project move forward! Until next time.

Rony Huys and Alexandra Savchenko helping the HYPCOP project move forward, photo by Tone Falkenhaug

– Cessa

Sled test for copepods

R.P. sled onboard R/V. H. Brattström

Happy new year to everyone! We managed to start 2021 with a day at sea, testing the R.P. sled for collecting benthic copepods from greater depths . January 27 we went out with research vessel Hans Brattström, crew and research scientist Anne Helene Tandberg who also turns out to be a true sled expert! She would join HYPCOP to teach how to process the samples from the R.P. sled on the boat.

Anne Helene Tandberg (left) joining HYPCOP (Cessa Rauch right) for teaching how to use the sled.

But first, what is an R.P. sled and why is it such an important key in the collection of copepods? The R.P. sled is an epibenthic sampler. That means that it samples the epibenthic animals – the animals that live just at the top of the (soft) seafloor – and a majority of these are often small crustaceans. The “R.P.” in the name stands for Rothlisherg and Pearcy who invented the sled. They needed to collect the juveniles of species of pandalid shrimp that live on the sea bottom floor. These animals are very small so a plankton net was necessary to collect them; a ‘normal’ dredge would not quite cut the job. They needed a plankton net that could be dragged over the bottom without damaging the net or the samples and also would not accidently sample the water column (pelagic); and so, the R.P. sled was born. This sled was able to go deeper than 150m, sample more than 500m3 at the time and open and close on command which was a novelty in comparison to the other sleds that where used in those days (1977). The sled consists of a steel sled like frame that contains a box that has attached to it a plankton net with an opening and closing device. The sled is heavy, ca. 150kg, and therefore limits the vessel sizes that can operate it; the trawl needs to be appropriately equipped including knowledgeable crew. It is pulled behind the vessel at slow speed to make sure the animals are not damaged and to make sure it does not become too full of sediment that is whirled up.

: Original drawings of R.P. sled by Rothlisherg and Pearcy 1977

: The R.P. sled in modern days with H. Brattström crew member for scale

Sieved animals from the decanting process

So off we went with r/v Hans Brattström pulling the heavy gear at ca. 700m depth with 1 knot and a bottom time of 10 minutes sampling the Krossfjorden close to Bergen. It was a beautiful day for it with plenty of sun and calm seas. The crew handled most of the sled, leaving sorting the samples up to HYPCOP under the guidance of Anne Helene. Which is not as straight forward as it may sound! The process of filtering the samples after collecting them from the sled is done by decanting, which you can see in this movie from an this blog (in Norwegian) from earlier.

Decanting set-up for R.P. sled samples

Decanting means separating the mixture of the animal soup from the liquid by washing them in a big bucket, throw the liquid through a filter and collect the animals.

Sieved animals from the decanting process

This all needs to be done with care as the animals are often very small and fragile. After collecting, the most time-efficient and best preservation for the samples is to fixate them immediately with ethanol, so they don’t go bad while traveling back to the museum.

Fixating collected animals with technical ethanol

For collecting copepods we use a variety of methods; from snorkeling, to scoping up water and plankton nets, but for greater depths and great quality benthic samples the R.P. sled will be the most important method. We thank Anne Helene for her wisdom and enthusiasm that day for showing HYPCOP how to work with such interesting sampling method

: Anne Helene (left) and HYPCOP (Cessa right) posing with the catch of the day

: Anne Helene (right) using her sled wisdom for fixing the cod-end with H. Brattstrøm crew (left)

We got some nice samples that will be sequenced very soon so we can label them appropriately. Although this first fieldwork trip off the year was mainly a teaching opportunity, we still managed to sample two stations with plenty of copepods and lots of other nice epibenthic crustacea, and Anne Helene is especially happy with all the amphipods she collected during the day. So for both of the scientists aboard this was a wonderful day – sunshine and lovely samples to bring back to the lab!

Some fresh copepods caught with the R.P. sled

– Cessa & Anne Helene

Follow HYPCOP @planetcopepod Instagram, for pretty copepod pictures https://www.instagram.com/planetcopepod/

Twitter, for copepod science news https://twitter.com/planetcopepod

Facebook, for copepod discussions https://www.facebook.com/groups/planetcopepod

See you there!

Door #21: Barcode taxonomy and the “taxonomic feed-back loop”

Species identification with DNA does not work well if your unknown search sequence is not represented in the DNA library. When we produce new sequences and check BOLD or Genbank for similar sequences, we sometimes obtain a “hit-list” of completely unrelated taxa. In the picture below, you see, for example, that the BOLD library has sequences of monkeys, flies, mites, and moths that are all about 70 % similar to the crustacean isopod that we tried to identify with the BOLD identification engine.

This and many other examples show that identification with DNA sequence similarity makes no sense if the target organism is not represented in the DNA library. This should also be a lesson for biodiversity studies based on environmental DNA (E-DNA).

When sequences from an organism are not represented in the DNA-library, identification will fail. The search results show that there are many unrelated groups (pictures to right) that are 70 % similar to a crustacean isopod sequence (bottom right) .

It is well known that Genbank (and BOLD) contain many sequences with incorrect species name. This may have different reasons. Some of the problems can be traced to PCR-amplification error. To amplify a particular gene fragment (the barcode gene) with the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) we depend on a so-called primer. The primer is a short sequence (about 20 nucleotides long) that is supposed to find a complementary and relatively conserved stretch of DNA in the target sequence and be the starting point for the construction of a new complimentary DNA string.

Unfortunately, in some cases that does not happen because the priming site in the target organism is very different from the primer. There is apossibility then that the PCR may amplify DNA from another source instead. In animal samples preserved in alcohol there is usually DNA from other organisms as well; it may be remains of food, parasites, or even other larger animals (such as Homo sapiens) that have been in contact with the preserved specimen.

It seems likely that this is this is what happened when researchers thought they had sequenced crabs of the genera Ethusa and Philippidorippe and deposited their sequences in Genbank. They did not realize that their “crab” sequences actually are more or less identical with sequences from spiny lobsters. Thus the crab phylogeny that was published from these contaminated sequences is clearly problematic. We have also tried to make barcodes for Ethusa species in our projects, but without success, so we suspect that this is the explanation for the error in Genbank.

BOLD search with crab sequences from Genbank shows that the sequences are actually from spiny lobsters.

In other cases we find sequences in the DNA library that are very similar, but that carry different species names.

A collection of very similar sequences from spider crabs collected from South Africa to the Norwegian Sea have been identified as seven different species by different identifiers in different research labs.

It should not come as a surprize that such data will be reflected by the identification engine.

Identification search in BOLD with a spider crab sequence that returns seven possible species names.

The identification engine says: “A species level match could not be made. The queried specimen is likely to be one of the following species.” Cases like the one above clearly call for taxonomic evaluation. Are these sequences actually misidentified by the people that deposited them in the sequence library? Or, are these seven taxa actually representing “good species” that cannot really be discriminated with this barcode marker? Perhaps they diverged relatively recently, but did nor change much in their mitochondrial DNA? Alternatively, are the seven different species names an example of taxonomic oversplitting? It may happen when scientific subcultures in different parts of the world do not have a sufficient global perspective on their regional fauna. So is it really acceptable to consider Macropodia falcifera as an endemic species in South Africa, as stated in Wikipedia?

This exemplifies yet another advantage of DNA-barcoding. It can be an eye-opener for taxonomic problems of different sorts that require more studies to be resolved.

Another striking consequence of the DNA barcoding campaign is that many species are much more genetically diverse than expected. Our work in the museum has revealed several cases of species with up to 30 % genetic difference in the mitochondrial barcode sequence. Such observations suggest that we may be dealing with undescribed “cryptic species” and demonstrates how DNA-barcoding has also become an important instrument in species discovery.

The issues I have described in this blog post need to be addressed in a so-called “taxonomic feed-back loop” with emended information to the DNA-barcode library. Only then can we hope to get our understanding of the units of biodiversity right and hope that we can correctly identify them with barcodes.

– Endre

PS: Make sure to catch the previous posts on DNA barcoding in our advent calendar as well, you can find them here:

Door #5: DNA-barcoding with BOLD

Door #7: New shipment of tissue samples for barcoding

Door # 8: The DNA-barcode identification machine

Door #7: New shipment of tissue samples for barcoding

In the upper right corner is a “plate”: the microplates with 96 wells where we deposit small tissue samples that are to be processed at the CCDB lab in Canada for NorBOL

On the third day of Christmas,
we sent eleven microplates away:
one plate cnidarians (A)
two with worms a-wriggle (B)
two plates of insects (C)
three plates crustaceans (D)
two (and a half) plates of mites (E)
and a half-plate assorted a-arthropods (F)!

Ahem. Yes.

As Endre explained in the fifth post of the calendar, collecting, identifying, documenting and keeping specimens used for DNA barcoding is an important part of what we do here at the invertebrate collections. Our mission in the NORBOL consortium is to produce DNA-barcodes, particularly for marine fauna in Norwegian waters and to make these barcodes available with open access to records and metadata in the BOLD database. These samples contribute to the building of a validated reference library of the genetic barcodes of the species found in Norway. You can search for different taxonomic groups here to see if they have been barcoded from Norwegian territory: Search NorBOL

The process is fairly straight forward (at least on paper!): Animals are collected and identified. Those species relevant for barcoding are selected, and a specimen (=1 animal) is chosen to be barcoded. We take a small tissue sample from the specimen, and keep the rest of the animal as the barcode voucher; if the need should arise to check if it really is what we initially thought, it is crucial to be able to go back and check the animal again. The tissue samples are collected in wells on a plate like the one pictured above, and the information about the animals – where they were collected, who collected them, what species they are, who identified them and so on is uploaded to BOLD together with images of the animals.

Representatives for the tissue sample plates that we just shipped off. Thank you Steffen, Anna and Per for contributing the terrestrial animals and images! Photos: L. Martell, A. Seniczak, S. Roth, K. Kongshavn. Illustration: K. Kongshavn

On Monday we shipped a new batch of plates – as (attempted) illustrated in song above.

Included is material from several of the Norwegian Taxonomy Initiative projects (artsprosjekt) that are happening at the University Museum of Bergen. We are coordinating the efforts on marine life, but are of course also facilitating the NorBOL barcoding of other organisms that take place at the UMB. There are animals from NorAmph (Norwegian Amphipoda), Hydrozoan pelagic diversity in Norway (HYPNO), Orbatid mites, and the insects found associated with nutrient rich marshes in Hedmark in this shipment.

We have also prepared several plates of Crustaceans collected and identified by the Norwegian marine mapping programme Mareano – one of the great contributors of material to the collections.

Now we wait for the lab to process them, and for the genetic sequences to be uploaded to BOLD – fingers crossed for many interesting results!

-Katrine

The amphipods around Iceland – fresh special issue

IceAGE stations with amphipods. Red stations are analysed in the special issue. Fig 1 from Brix et al 2018

As the IceAGE-project presents their amphipod results in a special issue of ZooKeys, the invertebrate collections are represented with co-authors in 4 of the 6 papers. All papers in the special issue are of course Open Access.

Endre, Anne Helene and IceAGE-collaborators Anne-Nina and Amy have examined the Rhachotropis species (family Eusiroidea) from Norwegian and Icelandic waters, using material both from NorAmph and IceAGE. We see possible cryptic species, and we described to separate populations (and Arctic and one North Atlantic) of Rhachotropis aculeata.

Rhachotropis aff. palporum from IceAGE material. Fig 4G in Lörz et al, photographer: AHS Tandberg

Anne Helene has worked with Wim Vader from Tromsø Museum on Amphilochidae. The new species Amphilochus anoculus is formally described, and amphipod identifiers working with North-Atlantic material will be happy fo find a key to all Amphilochidae in the area. These minute and fragile animals are often lumped as family only, but the times for that are now over…

Key to the Amphilochidae from North Atlantic waters. Fig 14 from Tandberg & Vader 2018

Neighbour Joining tree of COI-sequences from IceAGE. The coloured lines on the side show possible interesting regions for further studies. Fig. 2 from Jazdzewska et al 2018

A paper on DNA fingerprinting of Icelandic amphipods is presented by Ania (who visited us two years ago to work on Phoxocephalid amphipods) and 10 coauthors. This study gives a very nice material to compare with the NorAmph barcodes, and some of the interesting results are discussed in the two first papers.

A summary-paper on the amphipod-families around Iceland (Brix et al) gives an overview of both biogeography and ecology of the amphipods in this area. This paper also presents faunistic data on Amphilochidae from the earlier BioIce project, where researchers from Bergen, Trondheim and Reykjavik sampled Icelandic waters.

Anne Helene

Literature:

Brix S, Lörz A-N, Jazdzweska AM, Hughes LE, Tandberg AHS, Pabis K, Stransky B, Krapp-Schickel T, Sorbe JC, Hendrycks E, Vader W, Frutos I, Horton T, Jazdzewski K, Peart R, Beermann J, Coleman CO, Buhl-Mortensen L, Corbari L, Havermans C, Tato R, Campean AJ (2018) Amphipod family distributions around Iceland. ZooKeys 731: 1-53 doi:10.3897/zookeys.731.19854

Jazszewska AM, Corbari L, Driskell A, Frutos I, Havermans C, Hendrycks E, Hughes L, Lörz A-N, Stransky B, Tandberg AHS, Vader W, Brix S (2018) A genetic fingerprint of Amphipoda from Icelandic waters – the baseline for further biodiversity and biogeography studies. ZooKeys 731: 55-73 doi:10.3897/zookeys.731.19913

Lörz A-N, Tandberg AHS, Willassen E, Driskell A (2018) Rhachotropis (Eusiroidea, Amphipoda) from the North East Atlantic. ZooKeys 731: 75-101 doi:10.3897/zookeys.731.19814

Tandberg AHS, Vader W (2018) On a new species of Amphilochus from deep and cold Atlantic waters, with a note on the genus Amphilochopsis (Amphipoda, Gammaridea, Amphilochidae). ZooKeys 731: 103-134 doi:10.3897/zookeys.731.19899

The 7th International Barcode of Life (IBOL) conference

IBOL 2017 took place in the most fantastic venue imaginable: inside Kruger National Park in South Africa! Hosted by the African Centre for DNA Barcoding (ACDB) and the University of Johannesburg (UJ), the conference gathered ~450 participants from 72 different countries for a week of networking, knowledge sharing, and unforgettable experiences.

Participants of IBOL 2017. Photo by J. Potgieter

Located at the conference centre in Skukuza rest camp, IBOL 2017 filled every available room with sessions ranging from forensic applications of barcoding to the most cutting edge technology. A excellent overview of the topic trends is presented as an article that can be found here (.pdf, open access)

: Paul Hebert presenting future plans for barcoding the world’s biodiversity

: The conference venue

: We were fantastically well taken care of – here from the braai (bbq) under the stars

Norway was well represented, with 15 delegates and 23 contributions from various universities, museums and organisations. You can read more about that, and about Trondheim being the host of the next IBOL conference (to take place 17th-20th of June 2019) here (only in Norwegian atm).

: First attempt at a Norwegian group photo. Problems: a) an insect took all our focus, and b) we were missing some people Photo: Knut A. Hjelt

: Problem a) has been relocated, but b) persists Photo: Knut A. Hjelt

: Take 3: The Norwegian participants – enthusiastic about launching Trondheim as the host for IBOL2019! Photo: Knut A. Hjelt

The invertebrate collections of UM Bergen participated with five posters and three lightning talks on marine barcoding: three posters focussing on Norwegian waters, and two related to our MIWA-project (Marine Invertebrates of Western Africa, blog here). A lightning presentation is a five minute talk where the author gets to present their poster before the poster session.

Attending from UM were Jon, Tom and Katrine – as well as Lloyd from Ghana, who has been a regular guest researcher here for some time now, working with the MIWA polychaetes together with us.

Tom, Jon and Katrine on their way to Kruger (photo: THR)

Tom, Katrine, Jon and Lloyd attending the game drive during the conference (Photo: THR)

Our contributions:

Our five posters

Barcoding of marine invertebrates from Norway through NorBOL
Katrine Kongshavn, Jon A. Kongsrud, Tom Alvestad, Endre Willassen

Investigating the marine invertebrate fauna of the West African continental shelf with DNA barcodes
Endre Willassen, Jon A. Kongsrud, Katrine Kongshavn, Manuel A.E. Malaquias, Tom Alvestad

Building a comprehensive barcode reference library of the Norwegian Echinodermata through NorBOL – an ongoing effort
Tom Alvestad, Katrine Kongshavn, Jon A Kongsrud, Torkild Bakken, Kennet Lundin, Hans T Rapp, Endre Willassen

Diversity and species distributions of Glyceriformia (Annelida, Polychaeta) in shelf areas off western Africa
Lloyd Allotey, Tom Alvestad, Jon A Kongsrud, Akanbi B Williams, Katrine Kongshavn, Endre Willassen

Assessing species diversity in marine bristle worms (Annelida, Polychaeta): integrating barcoding with traditional morphology-based taxonomy
Jon A Kongsrud, Torkild Bakken, Eivind Oug, Tom Alvestad, Arne Nygren, Katrine Kongshavn, Nataliya Budaeva, Maria Capa, Endre Willassen

All the posters are available on the conference website. Do make sure to check the photo galleries there as well!

: Katrine presenting the progress on barcoding marine invertebrates from Norwegian (and Swedish) waters

: Tom talking about the construction of a comprehensive library of Norwegian echinoderms

: Lloyd presenting our findings on the diversity of glyceriform polychaetes from West Africa

It was occasionally challenging to focus on the excellent presentations, as temptations like this kept appearing – but we prevailed, and return with a lot of new knowledge and acquaintances.

That’s not to say that we did not make the most of our free time to go and explore the park!

Here are some of the amazing encounters Kruger NP offered us (Katrine’s photos):

[slideshow_deploy id=’2502′]

We had a fantastic time, our thanks to the organizers and the lovely team of volunteers for all their hard work!

-Jon, Tom, Lloyd & Katrine

PS: If you wish to stay updated on news from the conference, follow @DNABarcodes, #IBOL2017, and for news on the upcoming IBOL2019; @norwbol on Twitter

Bryozoan barcoding

By Ernst Haeckel – Kunstformen der Natur (1904), plate 23: Bryozoa (see here, here and here), Public Domain, Link You can also find the whole, gorgeous book by Haeckel here, courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library

I have spent the past week and a half getting acquainted with a rather odd – yet beautiful – group of animals, the Bryozoa, moss animals. These colony-forming, mostly marine, animals are small as individuals, but the colonies can grow quite large. Globally there are around 5000 extant species recorded, with a further 15 000 species in the fossil record. We have colleagues in Oslo who work on both the fossil and the current fauna to better understand micro- and macroevolution, you can read more about that here (og her, på norsk).

Sampling site of barcoded Bryozoans in the BOLD database

This is the first attempt at barcoding bryozoans through NorBOL, and it shows (map above); hopefully we will get more dots on the map for our region soon!

This may not be an easy group to get genetic barcodes from, though – I’ve been in communication with several of the (wonderfully helpful!) experts in the field, and the consensus seems to be that getting a barcode (from the region defined as THE barcode, the 5’ end of COI) will be difficult, and that we may anticipate “..a colourful array of contaminants, as well as nuclear mitochondrial pseudogenes”. Yay. Well, we won’t know until we try!

Together with colleagues from the Natural History Collections in Gothenburg we have assembled a plate of tissue samples from Swedish and Norwegian bryozoan that I will send to the CCDB facilities for sequencing next week. We have an impressive 58 different species (1-3 specimens of each) included on the plate, as well as a few specimens that are (not yet) identified to species.

Bicellariella ciliata for barcoding

The colonies can be branching, encrusting, lacelike, lumpy…and at times pretty close to invisible! I’ve had to spend some time looking for good illustrations to know what to sample from… there are often multiple species in a jar, as well as other animals – hopefully I managed.

The specimens on the plate

We’re treating this as a trial plate: is it possible to barcode museum material of bryozoans through the general pipeline, or will we need to get creative?

I’ll make a new post once the verdict is in – let’s hope for surprisingly high success rates!

Some further reading:

Lee et al 2011: DNA Barcode Examination of Bryozoa (Class: Gymnolaemata) in Korean SeawaterKorean J. Syst. Zool. Vol. 27, No. 2: 159-163, July 2011 ISSN 2233-7687
DOI 10.5635/KJSZ.2011.27.2.159

Wikipedia has a nice post on Bryozoa

When amphipodologists meet.

It generally happens every two years. The event may be seen as a natural phenomenon – or maybe rather a cultural phenomenon. I am sure it looks strange if observed from outside the community. A lot of people of all ages and affiliations meet up in places most of us usually did not even know existed, and we have the best week of our work-year.

Happy friends meeting in Trapani. (all photos: AH Tandberg)

The bi-annual International Colloquium on Amphipoda (ICA) is without doubt the scientific meeting I look most forward to. Every time. The fun, the science, the amphipods, the friendships, the coffee, the familiar banter, the late nights and early mornings, the discussions – all in an atmosphere of friendship.

The Polish Amphipod-t-shirt edition 2017. (photo: AH Tandberg)

The first day of any ICA could be mistaken for a family-gathering – or the opening credits of any film about best friends. The room resounds of “oh – finally – there you are!”, “how are the kids/grandkids?”, “I missed you this last hour! Thought maybe you got lost since you weren’t here immediately” and not least “Come, let me give you that hug I promised!” Ten minutes later everybody will be organised by the large Polish group for some gathering or fun – and the rest of us are trying to find out how we can get one of the cool group-t-shirts the Łodz-group have concocted this year. Or maybe we should rather go for one of the other cool t-shirts picturing amphipods?

We do talk amphipods, of course. The incredible variety of the group (of animals – as well as people) opens up for a wide spectre of research-questions and approaches, and meetings allow time to learn from each other, get inspired, start new collaborations and share samples and ideas.

Most important: the science of amphipods. Loads of interesting talks and posters! (all photos: AH Tandberg)

Those getting to the poster-session fast enough win the crochet amphipods… (photo: AH Tandberg)

This years ICA was held in Trapani, Sicily – where prof Sabrina LoBrutto on a short one year notice had organised the meeting. The three days we met were packed with more than 60 talks, more than 60 posters and loads and loads of happy amphidologists. With the University situated right across the road from the beach, and a lunch hour long enough for both a coffee and a swim/sample search the friendly atmosphere stretched to drying towels on the railings of the university-hall and sea-salted hairstyles for many after lunch.

Keeping the atmosphere friendly: Beach, coffee and icecreams (all photos: AH Tandberg)

The scientifically helpful Japanese amphipod t-shirt. (now the rest of you should notice the morphological differences between the families). (photo: AH Tandberg)

We always try to publish the Amphipod Newsletter to coincide with the ICA. You can download the newsletter both from the World Amphipoda Database and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (both places also have back-issues available for downloads). One of the features of the newsletter is a bibliography of amphipod-related literature, and a list of new taxa. Since last AN we have 79 new species, 14 new genera and 12 new families! Every AN includes an interview with one of the amphipodologists – this year you can get to know Wolfgang Zeidler and his Hyperiidea better.

The next ICA? In two years we meet in Dijon, France! I am already excited – and maybe there will be mustard-coloured t-shirts in honour of the location (or burgundy-coloured t-shirts)? What I know already, is that it is going to be like meeting family.

Anne Helene

Aliens amongst us?

It certainly does not take a great leap of imagination to get from these Isopoda collected by the MAREANO programme to various science fiction monsters!

click to embiggen!

I just completed photographing and tissue sampling 95 specimens that will be submitted for barcoding through NorBOL – we’ll send them to the CCDB-lab in Canada for sequencing, and upload the metadata and sequences in the BOLD database – fingers crossed for successful sequencing!

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.