IMBRSea Joint School - Adventures at the Swedish Coast

Hello everyone, so here is our last post about our Swedish scientific project on scavenging activity. Here are the answers to all your questions, the clues to solve the mystery, the revelations that you were all expecting. I mean, no, not exactly, that’s not how science is done. First we can’t give an absolute answer to any question mostly, and we do not answer such broad topics in 10 days. So here we are for the last breakfast in this amazing place, today is presentations’ day. We’re holding on to the amazing sunset pictures we took all week to give us some strength. We managed to finalyse our analysis and hand in our report (right on the last second actually). Our results and observations from the experiments show that the scavenging activity is higher during the night than during the day, in terms of rate of the process, it goes much faster. Almost every morning, when we retrieved the night’s experiment, there would be nothing left of the bait on the quadrat. This result was ...

Dear star-addicts, Consider this the end of the Star Wars! This is indeed end of the show. No more keeping up with the Stardashians; no more cannibalism; no more weird jokes (after this post, lol). We are as devastated as you are, but at least we will be getting some more hours of sleep and we are more than grateful for this experience and all the friends we have made on the way, (specially those five-armed-sticky-aliens, aka sea stars). For you to feel a little bit better, we leave you with our most shocking results: Indeed our sea-rebels showed clear activity peaks around dawn and dusk ! During sunrise and sunset is apparently also the occasion to get high, as a lot of our starfish were found wandering on the edge of the water surface at those time, while preferring the bottom during day and nights. Aaand, voilá, these party animals seem to prefer the  good nightlife. (Actually, we have no clear evidence that they go partying, it just happens to be the time they hunt. B...

SOS! Sensation Of Succeeding Hi all! This is S.O.S’s final blogpost! Last days have been extremely busy: we were collectors, movie makers, statisticians, writers and presenters! All those skills needed to be a good scientist. The final steps to finish our research included making 3D models of the substrate structure of the different materials. Science can look magical, don’t you think? To resume, our aim was to describe the species composition on natural cliffs, concrete and plastic in three different locations in Tjärnö Bay. Regarding our results, we found that the location where the samples of macrofauna and macroflora were taken, as well as the surface type (natural, concrete, and plastic substrate) had an influence on the diversity in the samples. However, in what intensity, depended on both those factors and no solid conclusions can be made. Besides scientifically analysing our samples, we also made a short documentary for all of you to see how we’ve been doing this S...

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

Hey guys! The Crab Therapists here with their last blog post. We will leave the beautiful bay of Tjärnö tomorrow and set sail for new adventures. After pulling a night shift yesterday, we finally corrected all the bugs in our dataset, analysed all of it using non-parametric multidimensional scaling and finally came to the conclusion that our little buggars showed no difference between lower pH levels and gasoline spill conditions compared to controls. Sadly, there are many reasons why we could not see any differences. For example, literature says that hermit crabs are really resilient to pollutants and acidification, and we need to consider our short time frame as well. Nevertheless, we had a lot of fun designing this study on our own and have learnt quite a lot. We successfully presented our findings today in front of our peers and are now very relieved to be free at last. Make sure you keep in touch with the official IMBRSea Youtube channel, where our movie documentary will be publ...

The analysis time has come. How to analyse it? At the beginning, we go slowly, gradually. Like one of many snails we sampled. We take time to work in R studio, we discuss the ideas patiently. In the evening, we go slowly, gradually as well. But it’s more like sliding off the rocky shore towards the steep cliff. Welcome to the ‘panic zone’. We have so much data, we are drowning in it. At the start of the project we wanted only to sample the rocky shores fauna and measure wave exposure levels on three islands. But in the process, we found ourselves collecting 2 different faunal samples per site (from belt transects and from quadrats), collecting algal samples, describing habitats on the islands and recording the weather conditions. We can do so much with it, but we have so little time. 2 days! 2 days to analyse the data, write the report, prepare the 14-minute long presentation, make a documentary movie and finish the blog (he-he). So please, don’t be angry that we did not post too m...

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...

More snail news coming right up! It is time to update you on how these fellas are doing in the new houses we kindly accommodated for them. So, allow me to suggest you sit down and relax while I explain. Let’s get down to business. After our epic researchers fought nature trying to get both our snail ecotypes, we had enough to continue with our light and plastic pollution experiments.  Although, the results we have been getting on these experiments haven’t been the ones we were kind of expecting so that gave us food for thought (and for wonder once more). Therefore, after talking about new ideas with our supervisor- which I might say he does know how to take us out of our comfort zone- we designed a new experiment to get different results by putting bait on both sides of the tank but only installing lights on one side, in order to see what would be the snails choice. This setup was looking very good and we got our hopes up high again.       Picture 1: Photos o...

Dear star-addicts, Hope our last post didn’t disturb you that much, because we still have some more shocking content for you. If you are ready for some more cringey humor and some spicy news, we invite you to keep reading. As you already know, sea-stars in our tanks suddenly started going wild. (Aka; trying to eat each other). As much as we would have liked to think there was some romanticism going on, we started being suspicious it might be something more aggressive than expected when one of our stars lost 2 legs and a half. But, aren’t sea stars supposed to be little cuties?  Traumatizing as this can be, you shall not panic, these animals are capable of growing back their limbs (#superpowers). Weird part is, cannibalism has not really been observed in this species, only if they have been starving for “long”, meaning “weeks”. Even though only two days had passed since we collected them (#spoilt?), we decided to prevent future injuries and feed them with some juicy fresh caught ...

Alright. Starting with a sunset banger this time. You’re welcome. What’s up, y’all? Since our last blog, only a few days have passed, and fortunately, major misfortunes have not fallen upon us. Well, apart from four tragic deaths of our subjects. I am afraid that the term serial killer is now up in our CV for life. We did successfully release all the other hermit crabs, though. We’re also currently analyzing our data - well, that’s not true. Luzia is. – and she is falling in and out of despair with R. It’s funny to watch, though. I do have a bad conscience because I am constantly laughing at her.  Anyways. Yesterday afternoon, we finally got away from work and did a nice little boat trip further into Kosterhavets National Park, hoping to see some cool wildlife and clear our heads for a while. We were dropped off at another island and decided to go for a short hike along the coast and back. Which turned out to be pretty amazing. Cabin goals – doesn’t this scream: JUST LEAVE M...

The Rockies hit the field for the last 3 days. We set up the Arduino distance sensors to measure wave heights on 3 islets and left these for 24 hours. Meanwhile, we went out to survey the fauna on the rocky shores of the islets. The Rockies team in the field, starting sampling. Credits: Freija Hauquier. We sampled the most exposed islet and the semi-exposed. Our team turned out to be so efficient during the first survey, that we were given a second boat so that we could save time and transport all the group at once to and from the island. On the first day of sampling, all very content with our field performance, we came to the lab to do some quick sorting and species identification and go for a well-deserved rest. Only then we realised how long it takes to do all the post-field lab work! It took us roughly a whole day to write down the species we found on the first day onto the datasheet. With each day, we became faster in the lab as we divided the work during sorting equally, w...

Professor Karim and Lucy after our last deployment, hurray!! Our experiments are finally finished! We were able to deploy BRUV (see our Finding Fish in Tjärnö Bay post for a description :) ) at all of our sampling locations, plus a few bonus ones. We sampled three different habitat types: sandy, muddy/algae, and harbour areas. Map of Tjärnö Bay with our sampling locations At all of our habitats we sampled at a depth of approximately 1.5 meters to assess what animals are typically found in the littoral zone of Tjärnö Bay - the littoral zone is the region of the sea closest to the shoreline. On our final day of sampling we decided to do a few extra deployments at 10 meters to search for species we didn’t find at shallower depths. We’re working on analyzing all our video footage now - stay tuned for an upcoming creature feature post! Justin and Catie setting up the cameras for deployment Since BRUV uses bait to attract fish, we also conducted snorkeling transects at all of ou...

So here we go again. Last time we left you hanging with the suspense of our night shifts. You were following the adventures of our brave team who decided to dedicate their health and rest to Science. Indeed we started running our experiments: the planning was to carry on 3 days and 3 nights of treatments. We then formed groups of 2 people for the night, and when we say ‘night’ it means that the first team was going in the water at 22:30 and Midnight, the second team was going at 2:00 and 4:30, and the 2 people remaining were getting up at 6:00 to retrieve all the equipment and prepare the next day’s experiment. Think that would turn us crazy don’t you? Naaah, we are marine biologists aren’t we? Water is our element and we are also highly motivated by our topic. And the amazing landscape that we have here is helping (can you imagine the star gazing at 2:00 in the morning?). Look how happy Captain Penguin is at being in this water, which is getting colder day by day! As said previo...

After deep, long and exhausting discussions one evening, we finally made up the master plan for our experiment. We could not wait to get our hands dirty and start sampling! As soon as we had our breakfast, we loaded up the necessary equipment, zipped on our wetsuits and jumped onto the boat. We were empowered again by the spirit of adventure! Caption_1 : Excitement and cold. Everything played out like clockwork in the field, despite the weather - we picked our samples, braved through the wind and rain, riding from site to site on a wave of fortune and enthusiasm. We took less time to collect our samples, as we only had to pick them randomly and in a shallow site. Meanwhile, part of our group prepared a makeshift ‘studio’ for the photography of the incoming Fucus samples. Caption_2 : Suited up and ready to go! Caption_3: Sample collection in process. We encountered some difficulties in the studio setup - such as finding a good material for the backing (a white bed sheet!) an...