Blogs of the CEG research group

Earlier this year in September Ivanković and colleagues published the results of a study coordinated by the research group of Jochen Rink at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen, Germany and presented highly improved genomes of the four planarian flatworm species from the genus Schmidtea. These […]

For the next door of our Advent calendar, I’d like to take you on a journey to the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most politically significant waterways. It is located between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman in the northern Indian Ocean, and acts as […]

Hi! My name is Finn, and I’m a teen Calanus finmarchicus (proudly in my fifth copepodite stage of development!). I am honoured to open the Door 17! To be honest, I should be napping right now, like all my trillions of friends, but I’m just too excited because soon, I’ll […]

For today’s advent calendar, I want to talk about my favourite organisms, the protists. In one of my last years advent calendar posts, I talked about their diversity and importance for ecosystem functioning and, therefore, felt like introducing this recent paper by Perrin & Dorrel (2024) fits the […]

CEG research group members Torsten Struck and myself are coordinating the task of Community Sampling, within WP5 of the the EU-funded BioGenomics Europe project. We have now completed our task, well before the deadline of February 2025 set by BGE. Our task began with annoucing two public calls, […]

One of the most remarkable beetle species occurring in the Falkland Islands is Leptusa (Halmaeusa) atriceps (Waterhouse, 1875), presented on the photo above (photo by Orlov et al 2019). It is a small, 4 to 5 mm long, wingless beetle associated mostly with decomposing seaweed on the beach. […]

Når du hører ordet sopp, er sjansen stor for at du tenker på den fargerike variasjonen av soppfruktlegemer som popper opp i store mengder om høsten. Eller kanskje du tenker på de enorme nettene av underjordiske mycel som de fleste sopper produserer. For noen er kanskje den skremmende […]

Whenever you hear the word fungi, chances are high that you are thinking of the colourful variation of mushroom fruiting bodies popping up in high abundance during the fall. Or maybe you’re thinking of the vast webs of underground mycelia that most fungi produce. For some, the frightening […]

It’s the holiday season, and as we know it’s a season of giving and exchange. One way I want to acknowledge a “gift” I received this year is to talk about the importance of collaboration and free exchange of knowledge and information. I’m currently working on my Master’s […]

For most people, discovering new species seems like an extraordinary event, something that happens only once in a lifetime or at least something very rare. However, for some groups of organisms, particularly understudied ones, it’s actually very easy to come across a new species to science and perhaps […]

Today, I want to introduce a fascinating group of worms that are particularly relevant during the Christmas season. Known as Christmas tree worms, these marine annelids belong to the family Serpulidae. They are renowned for their radiolar crowns and their habit of dwelling within calcareous tubes attached on […]

Menneskeskapte endringer og omdanning av skogøkosystemer fører til massive endringer i artssammensetningen i de berørte områdene. De storstilte økonomiske insentivene til avskoging, særlig i truet tropisk regnskog, spiller en viktig rolle i det raske tapet av habitater og natur som vi ser verden over. Selv i det langt […]

Human-mediated alteration and conversion of forest ecosystems cause massive changes in the species compositions of communities in affected areas. The large scale monetary incentives of deforestation, especially in threatened tropical rainforests, plays a massive role in the rapid loss of habitats and nature seen worldwide. Even in the […]

Cover: Picture by Greenland Institute of Natural Resources When I need to take a break from work, I often stroll around the Oslo Natural History Museum. Zoological collections have always fascinated me since I was a child, and now that I work for one of them I`m able […]

CEG har en lang tradisjon for å være vertskap for Erasmus-studenter på praksisopphold. I år hadde vi også to studenter på besøk fra Sardinia i løpet av sommeren. «Erasmus+ er EUs program for å støtte utdanning, opplæring, ungdom og idrett i Europa.» Det er et program som legger […]

CEG has a long standing tradition of hosting Erasmus students for an internship. This year we also had two students visiting us from Sardinia during the summer. “Erasmus+ is the EU’s program to support education, training, youth and sport in Europe.” It is a program that facilities knowledge […]

Species evolution is often depicted as linear, neatly separated branches of a tree, an oversimplification that fails to capture the true complexity of evolutionary history. This is especially true for human evolution, where the prevailing belief has been that the modern human population that emerged from Africa was […]

For our 6th door, I want to introduce you to a puzzling aspect of my favorite study organism, Calanus—a group of tiny marine zooplankton that play a crucial role in the North Atlantic and Arctic ecosystems. These crustaceans, no larger than a grain of rice, sustain our oceans and […]

In CEG group, we collect samples from the nature for various projects such as MeioSkag and PolyPro3 (marine invertebrates) and ANTENNA (insects). Here in the Northern Europe the best season for sampling usually is in the summer, or one might travel to an exotic location to find specific […]

All the biodiversity on our planet has originated through a series of speciation events. Speciation occurs when two lineages cease interbreeding, for one reason or another, but even after speciation the new species commonly retain the ability to hybridise for a while. Soon after speciation, the species genomes […]

The Falkland Islands is an archipelago located in the Southern Atlantic at ca. 52°S, on the Patagonian shelf about 480 km from the South American coast. The archipelago is composed of two large islands and almost 800 smaller islands. The total land area is about 12,000 km2. The […]

The recnt years have seen a hand over fist development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and such applications affect the daily life of scientists at an increasing pace, and the ongoing development may in the near future also modify our understanding of science in general. For biologist an […]

Det er den tiden på året hvor gruppen vår åpner en dør i adventskalenderen vår igjen. Det er min tur til å åpne den første døren. Gruppen vår er involvert i mange forskningsprosjekter som involverer genomdata, som du kan se når du ser på de tidligere innleggene våre. […]

It is the time of the year, where our group opens a door at our advents calendar again. It is my turn to open the first door. Our group is involved in many research projects involving genomic data as you can see when looking at our previous posts. […]

Etter et allerede sterkt engasjement for norsk biodiversitetsgenomikk tidligere i år, viste CEG et enda sterkere engasjement for norsk biosystematikk på tidenes første «Norsk symposium i biosystematikk» som ble arrangert av Artsdatankena og Naturhistorisk Museum i Oslo forrige uke. Med 10 av 49 foredrag og “flash talks” bidro […]