25-28 November 2024 – The annual team retreat was held at Flødevigen. Most of the team, and associated colleagues, participated: Torkel Larsen, Ben Ellis, Marthe Stendal, Alessandro Cresci, Kim Halvorsen, Anne Berit Skiftesvik, Caroline Durif, Howard Browman, Rolf Korneliussen, Tonje Sørdalen, James Poling, Guosong Zhang and Reidun Bjelland. Over four days, we shared good meals, listened to updates on our …

12-13 November 2024 – Caroline, Anne Berit, Reidun, Alessandro and Howard participated in the KNOWSANDEEL 3.0 kickoff meeting! The team is contributing to the project work package about larval dispersal mechanisms and its modelling. The hashtag#KnowSandeel project led by the Institute of Marine Research (IMR), Norway and funded by Norges forskningsråd (The Research Council of Norway) has officially started! Lesser …

22 October 2024 – Caroline Durif‘s Research Council of Norway funded project, Characterizing the migratory strategies of Atlantic lumpfish to improve stock assessment of this commercially important species (ECOLUMP), has been selected as a UNESCO Ocean Decade Action – see here.

8-12 September – Howard Browman and Tonje Knutsen Sørdalen participated in the ICES Annual Science Conference. Howard led a workshop for early career researchers on scientific publishing and Tonje presented her work on “Decoding female mimicry in a fish using deep learning”.

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. …

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).

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 …

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 …

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 …

25 April 2024 – Caroline Durif is one of the researchers interviewed in this article about the science that informs the eel management – led by ICES’s WGEEL, for which Caroline is co-chair – plan in Europe.

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 …

11-14 September 2023 – Several members of the team were in Bilbao, Spain for ICES ASC 2023. Alessandro Cresci presented his work, “Effects of low-frequency continuous noise on behaviour of cod larvae (Gadus morhua) in situ” in the session on “Ecosystem science needed to support a new era of offshore marine renewable energy“. Caroline Durif participated in WGEEL meetings and …

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 …

30 May – 1 June 2023 – Howard Browman and Jan Pechenik were at ICES headquarters in Copenhagen where they co-taught an ICES training course on scientific writing and publishing. Learn more about the course HERE.

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.