Lloyd (left) and Williams. (photo: Williams)

Goniada congoensis collected in Nigeria

A Glycera africana collected from Ghana

A Goniada multidentata from Ghana

For the past two weeks we have had two old friends visiting to work on the material collected through the MIWA-project:

Lloyd from Ghana, who has previously been here to participate in the first of our workshops in the Espegrend field station, and Williams from Nigeria, who has been both on the Espegrend workshops and who also included a visit to the Museum as a guest researcher in combination with the workshop visit last summer.

This time around, the focus has been on Polychaetes from the suborder Glyceriformia, mainly within the families Glyceridae (bloodworms) and Goniadidae.

Our visitors have been working on identifying specimens from a variety of countries, and selecting specimens from the different (morpho)species so that we could proceed to start work on a plate of Glyceriform worms that will  be sent to Canada for sequencing.

We have gone through the whole process of identification, section, photographing, metadata assembly and the creation of accounts and projects in the BOLD database, where our sequences will be uploaded.

It will be very interesting to see the results!

Photographing and keeping records of the animals selected for barcoding (photo: Williams)

Ready to take tissue samples to be sent to Canada for sequencing (photo: Williams)

Thank you for visiting, and for all your hard work!

The invertebrate collections are high in demand these days, and we have a string of visitors coming here to examine our material. They range from students just starting out to well established researchers – some are new to us, others are old friends returning.

Amongst the latter is São from the University of Aveiro, Portugal. She works with polychaetes in the family Nephtyidae, and came for a short visit in October. In her own words:

18-23 October: After an amazingly (for Bergen ☺) sunny Sunday, with a wonderful walk in the mountains, I had a very productive week looking through nephtyids from Western Africa.

More than 300 specimens were examined and ascribed to 13 putative species. The results were very exiting! Interesting distribution patterns and a couple of potentially new species for science. Now we are waiting for barcodes…                                                       -São

We have also had a Russian student visiting for two weeks earlier this fall. Polina worked on polychaetes in the family Onuphidae together with Nataliya, and will continue to work on some of the material that she examined. Currently we have visitors from Ghana and Nigeria, and that will be the next blog post – so stay tuned!