So we’re in advent again! I arrived last December to a chilly Oslo, and it feels like the year has flown by. For us, and I imagine for many of our readers too, the year has been characterised by rolling lockdowns and the steady pace towards vaccination. But […]

In June 2021 Vladimir Gusarov made a field trip to Cameroon. The purpose of the trip was to survey the staphylinid beetle fauna of the Ebu forest, collect samples for student projects and train a student from the University of Buea, Ms Grace M’ayuk Ojong-Nkongho. Ebu forest covers […]

Sequencing technology has changed in research in biology tremendously and probably much more than any other technology before. The development from radioactivity-based to nowadays single-molecule real-time sequencing of tens of thousands of base pairs in a single go in the last three decades is on par with the […]

The iconic polar bear (scientific name: Ursus maritimus) has become a symbol of the threats to the ecology and life history of plants and animals from climate change. Shifts in their distributions in recent years are likely caused by the altered Arctic environment. It has, for example, been […]

We hope you enjoyed the wrap up of the year 2020 for the FEZ group as a traditional advent calendar. While setting up the various doors we noticed that we easily could have filled many more, indicating that it was a quite successful year despite all challenges. We are […]

Our calendar is coming to its close and at the second-to-last day it features two Master projects, which started this year working with annelids, which are both completely computer-based making use of the SAGA supercomputer infrastructure through the command line, and all analytical programs used are monitored through […]

In June, Astrid Eggemoen Bang delivered her Masters thesis entitled ‘ The biodiversity of mud dragons (Kinorhyncha) in the fjords of Møre og Romsdal, Norway’ supervised by Lutz and Torsten and Jose. She assessed the biodiversity of Kinorhyncha in five selected fjords on the Norwegian Northwest coast in […]

Between different lockdowns and corona restrictions, we were lucky enough to go to the Faroe Islands. The field work at the Faroe Islands was an important link for describing the Staphylinidae arrival to Iceland, given the Faroes Islands are being placed roughly midway between mainland Europe and Iceland. […]

Øystein and Lutz have worked for many years together with international partners on the genetic differentiation of bowhead whale stocks with particular emphasis on the Spitsbergen stock. The Svalbard bowhead whale population is currently classified as ‘Endangered’ by The International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Extensive hunting, […]

The aim of our InvertOmics project is to obtain high-quality genomes for different spiralian/lophotrochozoan phyla at the level required by the Earth BioGenome Project. Therefore, we will use the new PacBio HiFi technology. However, this required high-molecular-weight DNA at really high quality and in high amount. This is […]

A new Postdoctoral Research Fellow has arrived in our lab this month. Over the next three years, James will be hard at work understanding the relationships between various different groups of flatworms, roundworms and molluscs. However, for the last two years, James has been up to something completely […]

FEZ members are also involved in academic teaching. This year, as for many others in the world it was special experience due to Covid. We will provide her an example of two Master level courses. This spring many members of the group as well as others from the […]

Last year, Marianne started her PhD-project in the FEZ-group. Marianne kick-started her project with a fieldtrip to the east-coast of USA to collect beetles. The beetles, which live in the cracks and crevices on rocky shores, proved to be difficult to find. With hammer and chisel, she managed […]

The last UiO:Life Science summer project in our group was conducted by Mari Dønnum Klausen. She investigated the distribution of meiofauna organisms along public swimming beaches on Nesodden. She herself wrote about her project on her final poster: “To be able to understand human impact on ecological systems, […]

The recently started FEZ project ANTENNA received funding from Diku, the Norwegian Agency for International Cooperation and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education. The network of seven universities, one research institute and one NGO, in Norway and seven countries across Africa, will provide training in modern DNA-based molecular methods […]

Mikkel Sinding did a joint (cotutelle) PhD at the Natural History Museums Copenhagen and Oslo. Øystein and Lutz were his supervisors on the Norwegian side. Mikkel defended his thesis entitled “Never Cry Wolf-The origin and genomic history of the indigenous Greenland dogs and wolves” in December 2017. Since […]

Field work is an important activity for many researchers at the museum. Every field trip contributes to development of the museum collection and adds species that the collection has been lacking. Sampling in poorly studied parts of the world results in discovery of many species unknown to science. […]

Many marine top-predators, among them many shark species, are particularly vulnerable to environmental changes as they are contingent on the various prey species along the food chain and their responses to shifts. The porbeagle (Lamna nasus) is a large pelagic shark that inhabits cold-temperate regions of the oceans […]

You remember door 3 of our calendar where we presented the UiO:LifeScience summer project of Liepa on the speciation of intertidal beetles? FEZ was very happy to house two further UiO:LifeScience summer projects this year. Morten Rese and Vegard Myrland Alvestad explored from different starting points how to […]

Rita M. Austin, a recent addition to the FEZ group, is working as a postdoctoral researcher exploring and optimizing the recovery of museum biomolecules in the Oslo Natural History Museum collections. Rita completed her PhD earlier this year at the University of Oklahoma, where she conducted meta- and […]

The marine algae belt comprising kelp forests, seagrass meadows and rocky reefs with coralline red seaweeds is one of the most active primary producing environments in the sea. It also harbors are great diversity of animals including sea squirts, ribbon worms, nick worms, serpulid worms, spionid worms and […]

Vetle started his MSc-project in the late parts of 2018, and continued with fieldwork in Iceland, Scotland, Norway and the Faroes. The goal of the thesis is to determine where the beetle fauna of Iceland originated from. With a thorough sampling from the northern parts of Europe, he […]

Plastic pollution has become a major threat to many marine ecosystems, and there is a need for an improved understanding of its impact on marine organisms. The Masters thesis of Gordon Breckwoldt entitled “Elasmobranchs as bioindicators? A comparative study on ingestion of plastics in the Nordic region” aimed at quantifying […]

Public outreach is an important task for scientists, not only for those based at natural history museums. FEZ researchers aim at disseminating relevant topics relating to the group’s research interests to the public. In 2020, José, Torsten and Lutz published together with our colleague Arild Johnsen from the […]

This year in September Alberto Valero-Gracia started has a new PhD student in our group. After completing a Bachelor + MSc degree at University Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) he worked as a Marie Curie researcher at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn (Italy). Throughout his time in Spain and […]