marine floristics | The Invertebrate Collections

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!

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.