From the seventh to the eleventh of March the HYPCOP workforce as soon as extra sat collectively to work on the identification of the species we’ve within the assortment. The technique was related as we had in Bergen final yr, however this time we appeared focus into particular clades. Moreover, we met in Flødevigen this time, as a substitute of Bergen, and visited Tone Falkenhaug at her jobsite with the Norwegian Institute of Marine Analysis (IMR, Havforskningsinstituttet).
The HYPCOP workforce in Flødevigen, from ltr; Cessa Rauch (UiB), Jon Kongsrud (UiB), Anders Hobæk (NIWA) & venture chief Tone Falkenhaug (IMR).
A method for figuring out species of hyperbenthic copepods is by taking a look at their colours. Sadly, these get misplaced as quickly as you fixate the samples in technical ethanol. Subsequently, we began the workshop with a brief sampling journey simply out of the bay in entrance of the analysis station. We took a small boat from the analysis station that had a guide operated hinge on the again of the boat, so we might use that for pulling up the seize.
Making ready the small IMR boat with use of the guide hinge and the seize.
Anders Hobæk working the seize
One of many benefits of working with tiny animals is that you just generally solely want small gear to gather them. The seize we used is hand measurement seize, not a lot greater than a 10L basket.
Nevertheless, as it’s made fully out of metallic it’s nonetheless heavy, which ensures it will likely be capable of “seize” the mud from the underside when it hits the ocean flooring.
As soon as we arrived at a pleasant location with the boat, we positioned the seize over the sting of the boat and let it sink to the underside which was about 40m deep.
As soon as the seize would landing it will shut and engulf softbottom materials together with the animals which can be related to it. The closed seize can be city again with the guide hinge from the boat. As soon as onboard, we might empty the grabs content material in a bucket and sieve among the materials. This materials would return to the lab for examination.
We fastidiously examined the sediment, and it was not but very wealthy with benthos. We caught a couple of attention-grabbing copepods species, that we documented and fixated for identification.
One of many species we caught with the seize
March will not be one of the best season for benthic copepod sampling, the water continues to be very chilly from the winter and a lot of the small algae must develop again. Benthic copepods are way more considerable with rising temperatures and many algae progress. Again within the laboratory we began engaged on our museum assortment copepods and assigned clades in our household tree that we might study first.
Tone Folkenhaug (left) and Anders Hobæk (proper) concentrated with dissecting copepods.
Greater clades had extra precedence, and so we took these samples and checked the person specimens. All of the specimens we had in our assortment are exoskeleton remnants from the DNA extraction (therefore we might have a phylogenetic tree). The exoskeletons are nonetheless good for morphology identification however onerous to see (on account of there translucent nature). Subsequently, to assist with the identification we might usually stain the exoskeletons both with lactophyl blue or lignin pink, which resulted in a visually pleasing assortment of ready slides of various colours.
Slides of Lactophyl and lignin pink stained copepods
Due to the workshop we now have handle to determine 145 out the 580 specimens; our efforts for figuring out will proceed and a brand new workshop is already deliberate, we meet once more in June and in September, with additionally this time, assist of worldwide researchers!
Keep tuned with @planetcopepod!
-Cessa