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!

Adele went out to Austevoll today to collect lice and eggs from a farm. These will be brought back in the lab, to start a couple more lines in our evolutionary experiments. We are in the darkest period of year, but also the one with the most stunning skies! Here, a picture taken during the ferry trip, just before noon.

We were able to collect salmon lice eggs from Oppedal, Brekke today. Thanks to Samantha Bui and Frode Oppedal at the Institute of Marine Research, for putting us in contact with the farmers !

 

Adele drove out to retrieve eggs from 50 females, enjoying a few rainbows and nice autumn colours on the way.

 

 

 

 

These were safely brought back to the lab, and will soon be used as part of our evolutionary experiments.

 

We will be looking for more eggs from more locations in the future. If you would like to contribute, or know someone who would - all suggestions welcome!

Thrilled to introduce Alexius Folk, who started in May from his Oslo home and has now joined us in Bergen. In his PhD he will focus on fitness estimates and selection under various scenarios.