IMBRSea Joint School - Adventures at the Swedish Coast

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...

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...

Hermit crab blog - here we go again! The last couple of days were somehow peaceful, as us Frankensteins were busy with lab work. We finished this morning, though! Finally! Considering everything that could have gone wrong, it looks like we have some nice powerful data. I feel a little bad for our fellow groups who are not that lucky. I have a hypothesis, though: my newly discovered prophetic powers are a gift from Apollo, the Greek god of knowledge. I guess that makes me a modern day incarnation of the Oracle of Delphi? So he’s bound to be smiling down at us. Maybe he will even convince Athena to throw in some wisdom to give us strength to deal with data analysis in R. That calls for a big offering to the gods, though. Being poor students, unfortunately, we don’t have a cow or a goat at hand, so we will have to think of something else. This is us, in case you forgot our faces :) Time to recapture what has happened in our lab ordeal. Where did we stop? Right. Creating a behavioural...

Tjärnö, Sweden, August 2018. A group of nearly fifty students and a few teachers invade an idyllic island laboratory like a swarm of ants on a quiet summer day in search of scientific enlightenment. Suddenly, there is a lot more hustling and bustling on the grounds. We all have a clear goal in mind – design a perfect short study related to the environment in this area. The stakes are high – all groups will be evaluated at the end of the excursion. Maybe, dear reader, you wonder: Why is this so important to us? The place where our fate will be decided. Well, time for a short introduction. All of us youngsters are part of an exclusive cohort called IMBRSea. This is an abbreviation for: International Master of Science in Marine Biological Resources. Sounds fancy, I know. But for us, it’s a dream come true. Here, we get to travel AND to study. What more could we want? As part of the Erasmus world, several universities have formed a network to provide us with exactly what we want to st...