The group of the month I would like to introduce to you today is a group I have a close personal connection with. The group goes back a long way with me. I will present you the annelid family Dinophilidae. After my Diploma thesis (today Master thesis) on […]

For this month, the FEZ blog is starring a group of tiny, yet particularly important marine animals. Calanoid copepods of the genus Calanus (raudåte på norsk) are present in all seas of our planet but it is in the northern hemisphere that these little crustaceans are the most […]

Rotifers, or “wheel animalcules”, are an interesting group of microscopic animals (size between 0.1 and 1mm in length) commonly found both in fresh water and terrestrial habitats; although less number of species have been described, marine rotifer species exist too. In regards with their classification, rotifers belong to […]

On the blog this month, it’s time to for me to present another family of polychaetes. I will take a few steps away from my usual tentacles adorned critters to write about a peculiar group of worms, the family Syllidae. Syllids are a diverse family, with about 1100 […]

Sometimes, work and home come together in ways you don’t expect. I decided to get into aquascaping this summer, growing underwater plants and keeping nutrient cycles alive and self-sustaining between the soil, the plants, and small invertebrates. In my research, I was surprised to come across a little […]

They may look a bit like bacteria, but Placozoans are actually animals! These microscopic blobs might, in fact, be key to understanding our own deep evolutionary history, and how the diversity of other animals came to be. Although they were discovered way back in 1883, there are only […]

This month at the blog, we wish to present Hydroza, which is a class found within phylum Cnidaria. This lesser-known taxa is perhaps more known than thought, as well-known species like Portuguese man-o-wars (Physalia physalis), the freshwater genus Hydra, fire coral (Milleporidae), and by-the-wind sailors (Velella velella). Also, […]

Monogeneans are a group of parasitic flatworms (Platyheminthes). The group is species-rich and systematists assign them to a class within the flatworms. Together with flukes (class Trematoda) and tapeworms (class Cestoda) they form the superclass Neodermata. The name-giving feature Neodermata is that the original epidermis is replaced by a […]

This month it is time for another group of polychaetes, the family Sabellidae. Sabellids are present from intertidal to abyssal marine waters all around the world (Rouse et al. 2022). They inhabit both soft substrates such as sand or mud and hard substrates such as rocks or coral […]

This month’s group of animals on the spotlight are nemerteans, also known as ribbon worms, vermiform creatures belonging to the phylum Nemertea. They include more than 1300 species, typically long and slender with soft contractile bodies. Most nemerteans are marine, predominantly benthic or bottom dwellers, but some species […]