Last week a long journey finally came to a result. If you remember, we were lucky to secure a Peder Sather grant to secure a collaboration between Rosemarie Gillespie’s lab and ours. Just a reminder from the last blog; Peder Sather was a banker and founder of the […]

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 […]

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’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 […]

Author: Rita Austin (former group member) Known as broad or fish tapeworms, these spaghetti impersonators are some of the largest parasites that can infect humans. Transmitted to humans via undercooked or raw fish meat, Diphyllobothrium are found in fresh and marine waterways around the world. Characterized as flatworms, […]

Door 23! Advent is almost over and a new year is on the horizon – and with a new year comes new ideas and opportunities in life and research alike. For my article, I’ve chosen to present “The bug in a teacup—monitoring arthropod–plant associations with environmental DNA from […]

As previously said, during this year FEZ advent calendar I have decided to briefly present you three works: a research paper, a researcher interview, and a book. For this occasion, my last contribution to this year FEZ advent calendar series, I would like to point out a publication […]

For my second entry in our advent calendar, I will again present a taxonomic paper. This time it is surprisingly not about worms, but about a rather intriguing group of crustaceans, Facetotecta (Figure 1). It is a small group of about 14 species, all in the genus Hansenocaris. […]

Currently, the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) is going on in Montreal, Canada. Again a COP soon after an earlier COP, namely the UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) has been held in November in Sharm-El-Sheick, Egypt. For many of us, including myself, the twin crises of climate change and […]

The arthropod subphylum of Chelicerata are made up of three classes containing extant orders: Pycnogonida (Pantopoda: the sea spiders), Merostomata (Xiphosura: the horseshoe crabs) and the diverse class of Arachnida. Although the relationships between these three have proven difficult to untangle, the historical perception of arachnid monophyly has […]

During this year Frontiers in Evolutionary Zoology advent calendar I have decided to briefly present you three works: a research paper, a researcher interview, and a book. The first door to which I am contributing if this quite useful method paper to whoever is currently working with whole […]

One of my favourite papers this year is, logically, about two of my favourite topics: taxonomy and worms. In this paper, Lavesque et al. revise the family Terebellidae sensu stricto (a part of the spaghetti worms I presented in a previous blog post) in French waters. They review […]

The answer to this question may lay in the paper I am presenting today and at some level genomes seem to be very stable. It was probably one of the most discussed papers at the museum this year. It was the topic of several journal clubs and shows […]

Text and pictures by Maël Grosse Among all the worm-like animals in the sea, polychaetes, or bristle worms, are probably the most diverse and striking group. This month is the opportunity to look at one of the most beautiful group of polychaetes (Fig. 1), the family Terebellidae Johnston, […]

Suddenly it’s already November, so let us introduce another cool animal in the FEZ blog. This time you can learn about an enigmatic little-known group: the acoels. Acoela is an order of tiny flattened unsegmented worms, belonging to the phylum Xenacoelomorpha (pronounced “zenacelomorpha”). They live mainly in benthic […]

Spiders, insects and even more so worms and wormlike invertebrates are often considered ugly and disgusting, at least unappealing, and sometimes even dangerous. Certainly, there is also beautiful invertebrates such as e.g., butterflies, beetles, dragonflies, or some sea slugs, but usually invertebrates appeal little to our understanding of […]

What is so fascinating or even better said the beauty of working with tiny worms? Many might be curious about this, when they meet researchers like me. I would suggest to look at the marvelous wonders of the hairybellies, the phylum Gastrotricha, and you will understand why it […]

Hallo again, and welcome to August’s entry in the FEZ blog’s Group of the Month club! This time, we’ll be exploring a charismatic wonder of the microscopic world: the tardigrade. Their ability to withstand incredible heat and cold, and even survive in space, has brought them a certain […]

Written by Line Willersrud and Rita M. Austin The phylum Chordata contains the three subphylums, Tunicata, Cephalochordata and Vertebrata. Vertebrata, which includes humans and all other mammals, birds, fishes, amphibians and reptiles, are differentiated from other chordates by having an enclosed vertebral column, the backbone. But inclusion in […]

The phylum Kinorhyncha – often referred to as mud dragons – includes exclusively marine meiofaunal species. Meiofauna or meiobenthos comprises animals that are characterized by size (> 45 μm and < 1mm) in order to discriminate them from micro- and macrofauna. Accordingly, Kinorhyncha are usually < 1 mm in […]

Written by Jose Cerca (former member of our group and now as a guest author on this blog) Spiders are some of the most charismatic animal lineages. Despite this, there are only a handful spider genomes available. This is likely due to their highly repeated and heterozygous genomes. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]