From April 13th to 19th 2024, the Ocean City of Bergen celebrated the ocean even more than usual(!) in a happening called One Ocean Week (OOW). One Ocean Week held conferences, meetings, workshops and activities – aiming to pioneer a sustainable use of the ocean. The marine group at the University Museum was a prolific participant during the event, here are some of our contributions!     Anne Helene was invited to give the opening talk at the reception in the Aula, placing the Museum and Bergen into the heart of the Norwegian ocean exploration beginning with “The Norwegian North-Atl ..read more

Katrine ran an activity on moss animals – Bryozoa – during the Family Day of OneOceanWeek in Bergen and part of our three-museum collaboration project NorDigBryo – Digitizing Norwegian Bryozoa. The full text in English is out now on the NorDigBryo project blog, and the Norwegian version can be found here – check it out! And make sure you are following our Moss animal adventures on Instagram: @NorDigBryo Here is what an AI generated “moss animal” may look like – it not *quite* how they look in reality! Made with DallE ..read more

Make sure to check out the seminars that are happening this week (April 16th-19th)! Researchers from the Department of Natural History give 30 minute lectures on selected topics in the marine realm each day at 14:00, read more about it here! LINK: https://www.uib.no/en/universitymuseum/169739/welcome-one-ocean-seminars-university-museum Topics, dates and times: Who eats whom? Marine worms with jaws – delicious and dangerous! 16.04.2024 – 14.00–14.30 Jellyfish in Norway – mostly harmless or murderous monsters? 17.04.2024 – 14.00–14.30 Sharks of Norway 18.04.2024 – 14.00–15.0 ..read more

Hi, I am Alina Lösing, a bachelor’s student from Germany with the great opportunity to join the Cnidaria and Ctenophora team from the University Museum of Bergen for a 6 weeks Internship. This experience was not only a chance to further strengthen my passion in marine biology but also very helpful to gain valuable insight into research and museum operations. During my time at the museum, I had the chance to join various projects of Joan J. Soto-Angel, including POLE2POLE (Horizon 2020, MSCA) on bipolarity, and Artsprosjektet NoAH (Artsdatabanken) on Norwegian Arctic Hydrozoa. I even had the ho ..read more

A guest post from two of our MSc students (in this case co-supervised with NTNU) who were here on a research visit for three weeks in January 2024.  We are Maria Buhaug Grankvist and Ellisiv Tomasgard Raftevold, and for the past three weeks we have been visiting the University Museum in Bergen to work on our master’s projects. It’s been a lot of fun, a lot of hard work and very useful, as the Bergen University Museum really is the place to be when you’re working with marine invertebrates. Both our theses focus on marine invertebrates, but two different phyla. Maria is working with cyclost ..read more

This summer, researchers from the University Museum of Bergen participated on a research cruise onboard R/V OceanXplorer, the research vessel of OceanX. OceanX is a nonprofit ocean exploration organization founded by Mark and Ray Dalio in 2018. The organization’s mission is to “explore the ocean and bring it back to the world”, and the vessel is designed and constructed by OceanX to conduct ocean exploration, scientific research, and document stories of discovery to share with the public worldwide in a state-or-the art way. One of the outcomes of the cruise was this amazing short documentary f ..read more

Today is World Jellyfish Day, and we at the Cnidaria and Ctenophora team have prepared for the occasion a poster featuring some of the beauties we have collected during the recent years in the context of our Artsdatabanken and EU MSCA projects. Happy World Jellyfish Day everyone! A glimpse of jellyfish diversity to celebrate World Jellyfish Day including 38 species from the North Sea, Norwegian Sea, Arctic Ocean and Southern Ocean. Photos: Joan J. Soto Angel Jellyfish are normally associated with nuisance and pain, and often considered a plague that is taking over the oceans, diminishing its ..read more

The Science Library of “Realfagbygget” organizes every semester a series of popular science talks, entitled “Kunnskapseplet”, offering an arena for students, PhDs, researchers and other staff to talk about their work or other any topic they want to discuss about. My PhD project is focused on the systematic revision of the family Orbiniidae (Annelida) using mitochondrial genomes and nuclear RNA gene clusters along with morphological analyses. Once the results were generated and the consequent discussion started, I wanted to take the opportunity to discuss, in a talk at the Science Library, abou ..read more

ForBio – Research School in Biosystematics held its 12th Annual Meeting at the University Museum of Bergen on September 19-21st.Sixty participants from Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Czech Republic, Poland, Germany and Peru presented their research results in various fields of biosystematics. The main day of the meeting took place in the Tårnsalen – a beautiful venue at the top of the museum building and was opened by a talk by Endre Willassen on the history of marine research at UiB. The participants in Tårnsalen. Photo: ForBio Four keynote speakers gave lectures on general biodiversity research ..read more

Earlier this year, the Cnidaria and Ctenophora group at UMB organized the 10th International Workshop of the Hydrozoan Society. The event was a success, and we asked visiting researcher Marta Gil to tell us a little more about it. This is what Marta, who is currently collaborating in our Artsdatabanken projects ParaZoo and NOAH, has to say: Hello to everyone! I’m Dr Marta Gil, a researcher at the association Ecoafrik and a member of the Marine Zoology Group at the University of Vigo, Spain. This spring I began a research stay at the University Museum of Bergen to collaborate with Dr Luis Marte ..read more