One year ago we tagged the first adult salmon lice from the first generation, starting our evolutionary experiment.
365 days, 50 sampling sessions, 612 tags set on adult female lice, scanned a total of 4176 times, and over 1.2 million larvae hatched later, we are proud to say that we have reached generation five.
Fantastic teamwork, I am very proud of what we have achieved in 2021 despite the challenges. One more year to go towards our 10-generation goal !
This week we have a guest from Oslo on visit. Espen Werner is here to sample metabolites and microbial communities from the slime of our fish hosts. He is a master student from UiO, supervised by Alexander Eiler. He will be back here for a second sampling session in a few months. Hope you enjoyed your time in Bergen, Even, and looking forward to your next visit!
We are looking for a researcher to join our team for 2 years and help build pedigrees in our experimentally evolved populations of parasites.
Here is the description of the position. Please spread the word!
Today we received samples of salmon lice from a third location. Thanks to Tina Oldham, Samantha Bui and Frode Oppedal (Institute of Marine Research) we now have eggs from Fosså (Rogaland, southern Norway) hatching in our lab. The larvae will be used to start a third group of evolutionary lines, getting us closer to full capacity in the lab!
Warm welcome to Peder Moberg, eager biology student and the newest addition to our team! Here monitoring the hatching of eggs and estimating survival of infectious stages in the salmon lice hatchery.
Welcome to Renate Løvlund Andersen who is joining the project as an assistant! Here she is behind her mask (left), with Timothee (right).
Today the collaborators on our project met for the second time. Over the internet once more, but we by now we are mastering the art of digital meeting! Almost exactly one year after the start of the first corona-lockdown here we are, each of us sitting home and casually commenting on our universities' respective Zoom backgrounds...
Thanks to everyone for their great feedback and enthusiasm - we all agreed that we would like to have these brainstorming meetings more often. Stay tuned for the next meeting in about 6 months!
These past two weeks the university has been in lockdown. Adele has kept access to the lab and has been doing most of the daily checks on eggs, larvae and adults. She was joined by Lex for recapture sessions. Our pilot studies in 2020 allowed us to refine the tagging technique. Now the bigger experiments have started and we experience very little loss of tags or lice.
Welcome to Freya Coursey, our new lab assistant! She has a MSc in ecology from Saint Andrews (Scotland) and will be helping us with data collection. She will mostly focus on egg and larval measurements from pictures.
Welcome also to Timothee Michaux, who arrived earlier this month and is now out of quarantine. He is a MSc student from the university of Liege (Belgium) and will be working in the lab as part of his MSc work.
Post-Christmas home office period. The view is nice these winter days, and blue tits and great tits have started singing outside!
