View Post

Collaborators Suzanne Alonzo and Holly Kindsvater visit the team at Flødevigen for a data-analysis workshop on wrasse mating behavior

19 – 23 August 2024 – Last week, our collaborators Suzanne Alonzo and Holly Kindsvater visited our team in Flødevigen – Kim Halvorsen, Tonje Knutsen Sørdalen and Torkel Larsen – for a four day workshop. The goal was to develop methods for inferring mating patterns and sexual selection from PIT-telemetry data collected on the corkwing wrasse spawning ground in Austevoll. …

View Post

The world’s oldest ballan wrasse

24 May 2024 – Marthe Ruud Stendal, a Ph.D. student in the team, reports on a new world record: a 34 year old ballan wrasse. Read more about it HERE (in Norwegian, but you can use the google translate tool).

View Post

Sandeel field work underway!

8 May 2024 – Led by Alessandro Cresci and Guosong Zhang, the team successfully completed a complex experiment in situ to assess the behavior of early life stages of sandeel and how this is affected by exposure to oil, by exposure to low-frequency continuous noise (offshore wind operational noise), and by the cumulative effect of exposure to both oil and …

View Post

ECOLUMP – acoustic tagging of lumpfish

24 April 2024 – April has been an exciting and intense period for the ECOLUMP project. We are now entering the spring reproduction period for lumpfish. The field season started in Langfjorden in the municipality of Alta in Finnmark, Norway, where the team marked 20 female lumpfish with acoustic tags. The array has more than 50 hydrophones, which will be …

View Post

The ECOLUMP project is underway!

25 April 2024 – The ECOLUMP project, led by Caroline Durif and funded by the Norsk Forskningsråd, has started! The project’s objective is to generate new knowledge on the ecology, migration and behavior of the fascinating lumpfish (Cyclopterus lumpus), a species widely used as cleaner fish (to remove the ectoparasitic salmon lice) in salmon aquaculture. One of the objectives of …

View Post

Caroline Durif leads the annual meeting of European eel experts!

9-12 October 2023 – The European Inland Fisheries and Aquaculture Advisory Commission (EIFAAC), the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean (GFCM) and the ICES Working Group on Eel (WGEEL) met in Helsinki, Finland this year. Caroline Durif was appointed chair of WGEEL in January 2023 along with Jan-Dag Pohlmann. Thirty-three participants gathered to share their expertise and provide the scientific …

View Post

Exploring individual recognition in wrasse and its role mating behavior

June 2023 – Do wrasse use individual recognition in mate choice and social interactions? This question is currently being explored in a field experiment involving Ben Ellis, Tonje Sørdalen, Anne Berit Skiftesvik, Torkel Larsen, Noan le Goff (B.Sc. student from Université Bretagne Sud), Kim T. Halvorsen and our team. Using our pit-telemetry system on a corkwing wrasse nest colony in …

View Post

Lumpfish survey

May 2023 – Caroline Durif joined the Norwegian Fisheries Directorate to collect data from lumpfish landings. These data will be used to estimate the conversion factor used to calculate a number of fish landed from the volume of roe collected by fishers. The team sampled lumpfish caught on the beautiful island of Senja in Troms og Finmark, Norway.

View Post

Effect of operational noise from offshore wind turbines on fish larvae

May 2023 – Alessandro Cresci and the team conducted an experiment – using drifting in situ chambers – to assess the distance at which cod larvae respond to the noise generated by operating offshore wind turbines as part of our ongoing project “Assessing the effects of offshore wind turbine facilities on fish early life stages“. See stories about this project …

View Post

CRISPRESIST AND NOLICE COLLABORATORS AT AUSTEVOLL

3-22 April 2023 – The team had a lot of visitors during this period to work on two projects; CRISPRESIST and NOLICE. The overall aim of these projects is to identify naturally produced compounds that are associated with Atlantic salmon susceptibility and resistance to parasitic sea lice and to develop tools that can be applied to boost Atlantic salmon resistance …

View Post

Co-designing science for the ocean we want

14 March 2023: A new article theme set was published today in ICES Journal of Marine Science – Co-designing science for the ocean we want. Howard Browman was a co-editor of the collection, and a co-author of the introductory article. Co-design is a central principle of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. Cartoon by Bas Köhler.