IMBRSea Joint School - Adventures at the Swedish Coast

Strömstad, Sweden… Skagerrak sea, long Norway spruce, Scots pine, marine mammals and birds… When you are working for your project all the time, nearly day and night (including weekends!), you barely find time to enjoy the beauty of nature during joint school. I think the only way to make us focus on something other than the project and go out is to make it mandatory. How? By including an excursion to the joint school calendar! And today was THE DAY! Everything started with a boat trip to Sydkoster while it was pouring. Therefore, before we left from Sven Lovén Centre in Tjärnö, I went to my room to grab my umbrella. Well, a few people were commenting on the fact that I took an umbrella with me (even some of our mentors commented that it was their first time that they saw someone taking an umbrella on boat) but once we were all on the boat and moving, one of my friends asked to use the umbrella and at the end, 4 of us were hiding ourselves from rain under it. So I guess it wasn’t a ba...

What’s up, guys?! Today we went sampling for our in-the-field measurements and I must say, it was an eventful morning. The initial plan was to take half of our team and a teacher to go to our sampling site near the camping, and perform at least 4 measurements. Just when we were about to leave, we heard one of our precious team members was feeling sick and wasn’t able to join us in the field. Since we needed an extra pair of hands, the ‘Rockers’ team was so sweet to lend us one of their team members for half a day. We left the marine station shortly after nine and quickly approached the first sampling site. The aim was to drop the anchor, perform a few measurements (surface current direction and speed, temperature, pH etc.) and then lift the anchor to get to the next location and repeat. It was only at our third location we had a little issue with our anchor. As I tried to lift it (as I did the two times before), I felt it getting heavier. It felt like something was pulling the anc...

Hey everyone! We are ‘The Algalblooms’ and our team consists of 6 members who come from all over the world, from U.S.A. to Singapore. For the next 10 days, we will work together to form as many (hopefully harmful, whaat??l) algal blooms as we can and here is how our amazing experience starts. Before we start to tell you more about our experiment and what we will do, we thought it will be helpful to give some basic information about harmful algal blooms (HAB). Briefly, HABs are also known as “red tides” and they are natural phenomena which have negative effect on environment and organisms. There are two main ways that they can have the negative effect. First of all, they can produce toxins which alters physical structure of cells and secondly, biomass that is accumulated can affect co-occurring organisms and leads changes in food web dynamics. One of the interesting things about HABs is that the toxic microscopic organisms called phytoplankton which contribute to the development of H...