Tag Archives: outreach

One Ocean Week 2025 – “Exploring marine life”

In addition to the activities during the family day on Sunday 6th within the context of One Ocean Week 2025, we had a behind-the-scenes special session at Litteraturhuset called “Exploring marine life”, where some of us at the Invertebrate Collections shared our recent field trips and research activities, and the cool creatures we encounter when we venture into the wild ocean.

First, Aino opened the event and showed that the Museum not only have fantastic exhibitions, but also passionate and talented researchers that keep producing new biodiversity knowledge at worldwide scale.

Two photos: a woman stading in fromt of a screen, and a close-up of the screen showing the programme

Aino opening the session “Exploring marine life” at the One Ocean Week 2025 in Bergen. Picture credit: Alexandre Jan and Joan J. Soto-Angel

This year’s lecturers, Sophie, Joan, Nataliya and Praveen introducing how we at the Museum explore and study biodiversity. Picture credit for the next 4 photos: Alexandre Jan and Sophie Steinhagen

Sophie was the first speaker to open the lectures. She guided us on the importance of macro and microalgae for basic and applied research, and how fundamental it is at many levels to be able to tell species apart.

Sophie ready to begin the talk "From green waves to green farms". The slide is in white and green

Sophie and the talk “From green waves to green farms”

Joan invited us to join him on a trip to the remote polar regions. He shared some of the highlights he found while chasing rare polyps and jellyfish. He also explained the challenges associated with working in extreme environments, how crucial jellyfish are for the normal functioning of marine ecosystems, and the little we know about most of them.

Joan and "Hunting jellyfish at the edge of the world", the slide shows an Antarctic landscape with ice and ocean

Joan and “Hunting jellyfish at the edge of the world”

Nataliya shared outstandingly beautiful pictures of the commonly misunderstood worms. She illuminated everyone in the audience with the great variety of shapes, colors and life strategies that worms come in. From intertidal animals to deep sea inhabitants, she gave many examples on how unearthly their ways of surviving and thriving can be.

Nataliya and her talk "Why do we need to study marine worms?". On the slide behind her is a green worm in the family Phyllodocidea, the paddle worms. It looks a bit like a dragon with many legs

Nataliya and her talk “Why do we need to study marine worms?”

Praveen closed the session with a comprehensive talk on jellyfish diversity in Norway, focusing on the work he is doing as part of his PhD with the poorly known but mesmerizing siphonophores and the vastly unexplored Norwegian Sea.

Praveen presenting the talk "Beware the Beauty: Norway's Stunning and Stinging Jellyfish" On the slide behind him is a close up of a siphonophore, looking like a (stinging!) cloud of balloons

Praveen presenting the talk “Beware the Beauty: Norway’s Stunning and Stinging Jellyfish”

The lectures constituted an opportunity for everyone in Bergen to take a closer look at our work at the Invertebrate Collections, and we genuinely enjoyed sharing our favourite creatures with a crowd avid to know more about natural wonders. We are already looking forward to One Ocean Week 2026!

-Joan

You can read about our participation on Family Day during One Ocean Week here:

One Ocean Week 2025 – Family Day, April 6th, Festningskaien

 

One Ocean Week 2024

the banner for OOW seen outside the University museum

From April 13th to 19th 2024, the Ocean City of Bergen celebrated the ocean even more than usual(!) in a happening called One Ocean Week (OOW).

One Ocean Week held conferences, meetings, workshops and activities – aiming to pioneer a sustainable use of the ocean.

The marine group at the University Museum was a prolific participant during the event, here are some of our contributions!

 

 

Anne Helene was invited to give the opening talk at the reception in the Aula, placing the Museum and Bergen into the heart of the Norwegian ocean exploration beginning with “The Norwegian North-Atlantic Expedition 1876–78”.

researcher giving a presentation

Anne Helene giving the opening talk during the festivitas in the Aula at the University Museum. Photo: Jenny Smedmark

Screenshot from the documentary. Do follow the link -> to watch if you haven’t already! Photo: OceanX

 

Aino also made a guest apperance in the aula as the documentary about “Seeing jellyfish as they should be seen” made by the OceanX media team was shown.

 

 

Saturday brought a presentation at Skolten about the UiB/OceanX-expedition last August, where Joan and Anne Helene presented some of their exciting new findings together with Henrik and Øyvind from BIO – and even Mattie of OceanX participated, calling in from the OceanXplorer in Singapore!

Presentations of what we found during the OceanX/UiB cruise last summer, where we explored old locatlities in the Norwegian Sea, and visited some of our fjords using the world’s most advanced research vessel. Pictured are Anne Helene, Joan and Henrik – with their animals! Photos: Katrine Kongshavn

On Sunday the 14th most of us were at Festningskaien with a plethora of activities during the “Family Day”.

Our tent at the Family Day. Photo: Joan J- Soto-Angel

For our “Meet marine biologists from the University Museum” we brought with us five activities focusing on different areas of research that we do.

We had:

  • Sharks (see SharkReferences.com for more), with a shark tooth quiz, info about sharks in Norway, and the chance to see shark skin up close.
  • Bipolar animals (project Pole2Pole) where people could explore the distribution of animals that occur in one- or both- of the poles, and learn more about why that may be the case
  • Polychaetes (project MAnDAriN) with a quiz of trying to match images of colourful bristle worms to their common names
  • A task on Jellyfish parasites(!) (project ParaZoo) where you were to diagnose which parasite our unfortunate jellyfish suffered from, and finally
  • Moss animals (project NorDigBryo) where you could learn more about these animals, see them up close, and pick up a booklet with fun facts and some riddles to solve.

    Our activities. From top left: Jellyfish doctor, bipolar animals, guess the worm, sharks, and moss animals. Images: Joan J. Soto-Angel

    Two of the museum pedagogues used our tent as the base for their theatre-based activity “The ice is melting! It is for real!” – so we had penguins too!

    The penguins Piia and Pling in action. Photo: Odette Tetlie

    At the Natural History Museum, our researchers offered free talks on topics of their choice; one talk every day (Tues-Fri). The topics covered here were:

    Who eats whom? Marine worms with jaws – delicious and dangerous! (Nataliya)
    Jellyfish in Norway – mostly harmless or murderous monsters?     (Aino)
    Sharks of Norway     (Nico)
    Elusive biodiversity: a journey through the less known but most exquisite groups of marine animals (    Manuel)

    a person pointing to a phylogenetic tree showing gastropods and how they are related

    Manuel during his presentation at the Natural History Museum. Photo: Cessa Rauch

    Nico also gave a talk at the scientific conference Ocean Outlook: the North Atlantic Ocean climate, deep sea and environment, on the topic “Bioluminescence in deep-sea sharks: evolution and functions.”

It was a hectic, but fun week!

-Katrine on behalf of the marine group

How do you show something nearly invisible?

a magnifying glass lies on top of booklet with the heading Bryozoa

Katrine ran an activity on moss animals – Bryozoa – during the Family Day of OneOceanWeek in Bergen and part of our three-museum collaboration project NorDigBryo – Digitizing Norwegian Bryozoa.

The full text in English is out now on the NorDigBryo project blog, and the Norwegian version can be found here – check it out!

And make sure you are following our Moss animal adventures on Instagram: @NorDigBryo

A fantasy animal that looks like a cross between a snail and a nautikus covered in moss, with some bonus mushrooms on it, created with AI

Here is what an AI generated “moss animal” may look like – it not *quite* how they look in reality! Made with DallE.

Door #10: The Molluscan Forum 2018 in London

Special 20th anniversary 22.11.18
The Malacological Society of London
Conference talk about citizen scientists

A few weeks ago, Manuel Malaquias, Justine Siegwald and me travelled to London in order to attend the 20th anniversary conference of the Malacological Society of London, UK. This society is dedicated to research and education on molluscs. Although based in London (as the name refers to), the society is internationally orientated and welcomes all members interested in the scientific study of molluscs. The society was founded in 1893 and registered as a charity. One of the many activities of the society is to organize meetings and symposia, and this year it turned out to be a 20th anniversary of the molluscan forum!

It was an incredible interesting day with a lot of inspirational posters and talks. My mission for that day was to present our ‘Sea slugs of Southern Norway’ project with the emphasis on how citizen scientist made this project a success. I wanted to share with the audience how citizen scientists with the right approach could be the future for many scientific studies.

Cessa presenting at the Molluscan Forum, 22th of November 2018

But first let us have a look into the meaning of citizen science. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, citizen science is scientific work undertaken by members of the general public, often in collaboration with or under the direction of professional scientists and scientific institutions. The term was first coined during the nineties in the United States of America. Since than it has grown in popularity, with multiple projects in the world that rely on the input of data generated by the general public. Some big and well-known examples are eBird, with roughly 411K users, Nasa Globe with 640K users, iNaturalist, with almost 1 million users and OPAL with 930K users and counting.

Increase of popularity of citizenscience projects per year, Nature 2018

Since the beginning of this year we put a lot of effort in setting up a network of volunteers and underwater photographers. We got many good people willing to contribute to our project and most them are located in the South of Norway, but we also have a few located more further up North in Norway. Currently we have around 150 members directly and indirectly involved in helping us with our project. We try to involve our citizen scientist in the project as much as possible and one way is by reaching out to them via several social media platforms. For example, in our Facebook group community members can participate in discussions about species descriptions and share their findings etc. But we also have an Instagram account that functions as a pocket field guide for followers. Besides we try to keep everyone up to date about the project by regular posting blogs.

Cessa showing the different social media platforms used in the project during the Molluscan Forum

But our key element in this project definitely goes to the assembly and design of our sampling kits. These were designed specially for our citizen scientists in order to make collecting easier, more accessible and more standardized for everyone. By trying to standardize the collecting steps with so-called instructed sampling kits we minimized the errors that could occur during sampling of the data. The sampling kits contain plastic jars for the samples, fixative, preprinted labels and a USB flash drive with enough space for high-resolution pictures and a preset excel file that only needs filling in.

Example of the content of a citizen science sampling kit designed for the Sea slugs of Southern Norway project

We noticed that this approach worked out and the data quantity and quality increased as well the recruitment became easier. When we look at all the Norwegian sea slug records from the museum collection since the 19th century, it consists of roughly 1400 records. In just over six months time we see that the contribution of the citizen scientists covers almost half of that.

A comparison of the amount of records collected by citizen scientists since this year compared to our museum collection

Eubranchus farrani species complex, one species or multiple?

The material that is sent in by the citizen scientists is at the moment being studied by us. We have two master students who will start working in January on a variety of taxonomic challenges by studying the different geographical material.

 

An example of this is Eubranchus farrani species complexes that have different color morphotypes from different geographical locations. Do we deal here with one species or multiple?

Stay tuned for a follow up!

Furthermore
Sea slugs of Southern Norway recently got its own Instagram account! Perfect for on the go if you would like to quickly check some species, click here https://www.instagram.com/seaslugsofsouthernnorway/ and don’t forget to follow us.

Become a member of the sea slugs of southern Norway facebook group, stay updated and join the discussion; https://www.facebook.com/groups/seaslugsofsouthernnorway/

Explore the world, read the invertebrate blogs!

-Cessa