Category Archives: BOLD

Participant snapshots – Trond

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Name: Trond R. Oskars

Home institution: University Museum of Bergen, Norway (blog here)

What do you work with at home?

Samples, big and small

Samples, big and small

I have recently been working on preparing material for the workshop by sorting benthic samples from the West-African coast, paying particular attention to the Bivalvia (clams, oysters, cockles etc.) and the Ophistobranchs (a group of gastropods/snails), as these are some of the focus groups for the workshop.   I defined the specimens to morphospecies and/or genus, to ease the work for the experts who will be working on identifying them to species. I am also preparing papers on Cephalaspidea and Philinidae (snails) from my master thesis work, and preparing to start my Ph.D.

Jar upon jar upon jar of molluscs

Jar upon jar upon jar of molluscs

Creating some order

Organizing

 

 

 

 

 

 

What are you working on here?IMG_0184

On the workshop I have been nominated as the “gastropod team”. The previous workshop got a lot of nice results on the gastropods, and it was decided to continue the work this year. My task is to organize the species by family, and pick suitable specimens from target families that we wish to do DNA barcoding on, prepare the barcoding samples, and keep the database up to date.

Biodiversity in a dish

One of my (non-marine) colleagues asked me what I was planning on doing with the cartload of samples I was hauling into the lab – so I decided to write a little here, explaining what it is we do when we sort the samples.

R/V Dr Fridtjof Nansen

R/V Dr Fridtjof Nansen

The first step is of course to aquire said samples. Ours have been collected from the West African continental shelf in agreement with the Guinea Current (GCLME) and Canary Current (CCLME) Large Marine Ecosystem projects.

The sampling has been done by the R/V Dr. Fridjof Nansen.

 

At present we house samples collected from close to 650 stations along the West African coast.

You will find all the stations and their associated metatdata in this interactive map – here’s a static version of the same:

Stations

Stations

Once the samples have arrived at the University Museum, we begin the laborious process of identifying the fauna within. The first step is – rather obviously – to separate the animals from the sediment. Whilst doing this, we also do a rough sorting of the animals to what we call the main groups: Echinoderms, Crustaceans, Polychaeta, Mollusca and so on.

Below are some pictures from the processing of a sample collected by use of a sledge at 106 m depth in the waters of Senegal in 2011.

A 1 l container of decanted (= the most animal rich part of the sample) sample - from the same station we will have several bottles with different fractions of sample (decanted, 1 mm, 5 mm,...). Large or particularly conspicuos animals are picked out separately whilst processing the samples on board.

A 1 liter container of decanted (= the most animal rich part of the sample) sample – from the same station we will have several bottles with different fractions  (decanted, 1 mm, 5 mm,…). Large or particularly conspicuos animals are picked out separately whilst processing the samples on board.

Sorting using a dissecting microscope

Sorting using a dissecting microscope

A petri dish with two tea spoons worth of unsorted sample collected by sled.

A petri dish with two tea spoons worth of unsorted sample collected by sled (this is from a decanted fraction, though – not all containers will be this intensely populated!)

Zooming in..my, that's a lot of animals!

Zooming in..my, that’s a lot of animals!

At a glance

At a glance..Ostracoda,  Galatheidae,  a Ebalia (the pink crab), isopods, amphipods and a lot of polychaeta.

Once the animals have been sorted to the main groups, they are passed on to the taxonomists, who will (do their best to) identify them to species. This is done to learn more about the rich species diversity of this region, and to compare it with the  northern fauna. Some of the identified animals will be used as DNA barcode vouchers, helping us build a library of the genetic barcodes* of the marine invertebrates of western Africa.

*within the framework of the Barcode of Life Data Systems; “BOLD”

A left-handed hermit

Ciliopagurus caparti belongs to the group of hermit crabs that is sometimes called left- handed because the left claw is larger than the right, as opposed to the situation in other hermit crabs. C. caparti was originally described as a new genus Trizopagurus. The original description in Bulletin, Institut Royal des Sciences Naturelles de Belgique, 28(39): 1–8 is available for download from ATOL:Decapoda. We hope that our just submitted samples will yield DNA-barcodes of the species in the BOLD database.

Ciliopagurus caparti expelled from its snail shell residence

Ciliopagurus caparti expelled from its snail shell residence

Geographic position of a new sample to the BOLD-database

Geographic position of a new sample to the BOLD-database

 

Slipper lobster

I just photographed some specimens from the family Scyllaridae, and they are such funny looking critters that I decide to share them on the blog. The Scyllaridae are found in all warm oceans and seas, and typically live from shallow water and down to depths of about 500 m (according to Wikipedia).

Scyllarus carpati from Mauritania

Scyllarus carpati from Mauritania

Pictured is a Scyllarus carpati from Mauritania, collected by sledge at 100 meters.

If you click here, you can se the distribution of the species, as well as its IUCN Red List status. We will take tissue samples from this specimen and send it for COI DNA barcoding, which will be incorporated in the BOLD database. There are records of specimens from the same genus recorded in BOLD already, but none of this particular species, as you can see if you search for Scyllarus carpati here.