We recently had a visitor here, Anna, who was working on the Asteroidea – the sea stars – collected through MIWA. In her own words:

21 February – 4 March

I am a specialist in asteroids from the P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, Russian Academy of Sciences. Although I mostly work on the deep-sea star fishes from the northern regions, I was very interested in examination of the shallow water fauna off the Western Africa.

I have examined more than 150 specimens of sea stars during a two-week stay. As a result, I have identified about 22 species belonging to 13 genera. The most diverse and abundant genus it this collection was Astropecten that included very different species, from small to enormous ones.

I had a very successful work in Bergen, which was very interesting and useful for me as a taxonomist!

Thank you for the visit and the blog post, Anna!

The next step for us will be to try to do some DNA barcoding on the material she has identified.