IMBRSea Joint School - Adventures at the Swedish Coast

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...

In order for our Hunger Games inspired behavior experiment to work, we obviously need brave tributes to fight in the arena. We decided on the shrimp species Crangon crangon to be our contestant facing the frightening green shore crab Carcinus maenas. Consequently, one of our first important jobs was to fish for our protagonists and the villains. The first days, while we were exploring the islands of Tjärnö and Saltö, where the marine station is located, we noticed that the shrimps are hanging out quite close to shore in the shallow water. They are not at all afraid but rather curious and bold enough to swim up to one’s feet to closely observe if there is anything interesting to find between the toes. So, we knew we wouldn’t have to far find for our new favorite invertebrates. Our first attempt in finding some potential tributes. Some team members were not used to the “freezing” Swedish water temperatures (22°C). Hand nets, purse seines and traps During the past few days sever...

In these past few days, at the Tjärnö Marine Biological Laboratory in Sweden, we have been doing an experiment based on how temperature affects a shrimp species ( Crangon crangon ) in the presence of a predator and a competitor. Guided by Dr. Silvan Goldenberg, we will run different tests to see how C. crangon responds to different situations. These situations are based on a main aspect: the temperature. There will be two different sets of temperature - the ambient temperature, which is 22°C, and the situation of a possible global warming, with a temperature of 26°C. We will also test to see how this species reacts to the presence of a competitor and the presence of a predator (crab Carcinus maenas ). This species of shrimp is abundant in Scandinavia and is important for fisheries. Left: Shrimp (Crangon crangon) used in this project. Right: Crab (Carcinus maenas) as the predator. Before we began the experiments, we did some pilot tests to set up the best conditions and ...