Your last Snail Mail ☹

Your last snail mail is on your screens.
Sit back, relax and enjoy reading about the stress we went through in the last two days to pull our project together.

Our snails are back in the sea where they belong, our experiment station is all cleaned up, and now it’s down to the real business… making sense of all the data we have collected! Everyone here has their head buried in their laptops analysing, typing, reading and editing.

To conclude our research, sea snails are not to be underestimated! We have seen that these little shnails are very resilient to anthropogenic pressures like light and plastic pollution, they have a very good survival rate due to their ability to hide in their shells and wait out the disturbance! It seems that if the world ends there’ll only be the snails and cockroaches left.
With just a few hours to go to hand in the final report, late nights were had by all, and it doesn’t end there. As soon as the report is in, we have to switch our focus to making a documentary even Sir David Attenborough would be proud to voiceover. Not to mention our presentation too!

To take our minds off the numbers, we took a break to appreciate the beautiful sunset that we’re so lucky to have experienced most days.
From all of us on Team Snailed It!...
We’d like to thank you, the readers for keeping up with us, to our professors who answered all the questions we threw at them, and to our fellow students who made us laugh when we wanted to crawl into our shells and cry.
We’ll leave you all with a little video of the team.

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Goodbye my BRUVver, Goodbye my friend

Just a few hours are left of the summer school, the report is done, presentation complete, video shown (to mixed reviews…philistines). We’ve had an incredible time here in Sweden and have learned a lot, about fish, BRUV devices, and ourselves… One of the many beautiful sunsets of Tjärnö Surprisingly our experiments worked out well, we discovered that the most complex habitats did indeed have the most fish. They like structures and hiding places, but not as much as they like mussels…which is why we managed to actually see them on the video! We watched many clips like this screenshot to count so many fish Thank you for keeping up with Team eFISHency over the past 10 days! We’ve enjoyed every moment (well mostly…), and are really happy with our work! xoxo Gossip Pearl

The wet lab odyssey begins

The Hunger Games wouldn’t be as majestic and thrilling if it weren’t for the games being held in Panem, a futuristic city where the wealthiest and wisest of all beings control the rest of the districts and shape the lives of the masses. So how do a bunch of marine biologists relate to all of this? Well, since we are superior beings, we have the control over our Panem, the wet lab. Just like the movie, districts are our holding tanks and high speed trains are water flows cascading towards the hottest district, where all our competitors await for their chance to be the next Katniss. Arduino, a kind of motherboard to which it’s possible to attach a series of different sensors and switches was used to regulate seawater temperature in our world of two districts: the hot and the cold districts. Our main goal was controlling the temperature in the tanks where our shrimp were kept overnight. This was sort of complex as we needed to have warm baths of running seawater at constant temperatur...

Once upon a time in a land far far north…

Hello fellow marine science lovers! This is the first of a series of blogposts in which we will tell you about our time at Tjarno Marine Station, in Sweden, as part of the Joint School module of IMBRSea master’s programme. Our group is formed of 5 intrepid ocean researchers-to-be from very diverse backgrounds both in terms of our previous studies and country of origin. The aim of the Joint School module is to replicate the process of producing a research paper, therefore we will be planning, designing, executing and hopefully succeeding at producing a great study! This is our crew looking very confused during our first brainstorming meeting! Getting to know the new lands... Our proposed study is, on broad terms, about the fauna (we chose snails!) we find in the microtidal zone along the West Coast of the Swedish Baltic sea. Microtidal refers to the fact that the tidal movements here are very small, a lot less than what most of us were used to in central w...

IMBRSea Joint School - Adventures at the Swedish Coast

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