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HYPCOP workshop in Flødevigen | The Invertebrate Collections

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    From the seventh to the eleventh of March the HYPCOP workforce as soon as extra sat collectively to work on the identification of the species we have now within the assortment. The technique was comparable as we had in Bergen final 12 months, however this time we appeared focus into particular clades. In addition to, we met in Flødevigen this time, as an alternative of Bergen, and visited Tone Falkenhaug at her jobsite with the Norwegian Institute of Marine Analysis (IMR, Havforskningsinstituttet).

    The HYPCOP workforce in Flødevigen, from ltr; Cessa Rauch (UiB), Jon Kongsrud (UiB), Anders Hobæk (NIWA) & undertaking chief Tone Falkenhaug (IMR).

    A method for figuring out species of hyperbenthic copepods is by taking a look at their colours. Sadly, these get misplaced as quickly as you fixate the samples in technical ethanol. Due to this fact, we began the workshop with a brief sampling journey simply out of the bay in entrance of the analysis station. We took a small boat from the analysis station that had a guide operated hinge on the again of the boat, so we might use that for pulling up the seize.

    Making ready the small IMR boat with use of the guide hinge and the seize.

    Anders Hobæk working the seize

    One of many benefits of working with tiny animals is that you simply generally solely want small gear to gather them. The seize we used is hand dimension seize, not a lot larger than a 10L basket.

    Nonetheless, as it’s made totally out of steel it’s nonetheless heavy, which ensures it is going to be capable of “seize” the mud from the underside when it hits the ocean ground.

    As soon as we arrived at a pleasant location with the boat, we positioned the seize over the sting of the boat and let it sink to the underside which was about 40m deep.

    As soon as the seize would landing it might shut and engulf softbottom materials together with the animals which are related to it. The closed seize could be city again with the guide hinge from the boat. As soon as onboard, we’d empty the grabs content material in a bucket and sieve a number of the materials. This materials would return to the lab for examination.

    We fastidiously examined the sediment, and it was not but very wealthy with benthos. We caught a number of attention-grabbing copepods species, that we documented and fixated for identification.

    One of many species we caught with the seize

    March is just not the most effective season for benthic copepod sampling, the water remains to be very chilly from the winter and a lot of the small algae must develop again. Benthic copepods are far more ample with rising temperatures and plenty of algae progress. Again within the laboratory we began engaged on our museum assortment copepods and assigned clades in our household tree that we’d look at first.

    Tone Folkenhaug (left) and Anders Hobæk (proper) concentrated with dissecting copepods.

    Greater clades had extra precedence, and so we took these samples and checked the person specimens. All of the specimens we had in our assortment are exoskeleton remnants from the DNA extraction (therefore we might have a phylogenetic tree). The exoskeletons are nonetheless good for morphology identification however onerous to see (as a result of there translucent nature). Due to this fact, to assist with the identification we’d usually stain the exoskeletons both with lactophyl blue or lignin pink, which resulted in a visually pleasing assortment of ready slides of various colours.

    Slides of Lactophyl and lignin pink stained copepods

    Due to the workshop we now have handle to establish 145 out the 580 specimens; our efforts for figuring out will proceed and a brand new workshop is already deliberate, we meet once more in June and in September, with additionally this time, assist of worldwide researchers!

    Keep tuned with @planetcopepod!

    -Cessa

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