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 […]

Gnathostomuida, also known as “lesser jaw worms”, is a phylum of about 100 described species of minute marine worms. The first gnathostomulid was discovered in 1928, in the fine sand of Kiel (Germany), by Adolf Remane. Later, Riedl (1969) elevated the animal group to the rank of phylum. […]

Summer is here, so it’s time for the Artsdatabanken project team to go back to the field. Or to the sea, in our case. After driving 500km from the east to the west coast, through beautiful mountains and majestic fjords, we arrived at Austevoll (Figure 1), an archipelago […]

Spooky scary skeleton shrimp, send shivers down your spine, their appearance will shock your soul, but certainly don’t seal your doom tonight! Family Caprellidea, otherwise known as skeleton shrimp, are small marine arthropods that are found world-wide. Using their specialized ‘feet’, called pereopods, these slender, segmented invertebrates cling […]

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 […]

By now, everyone knows that a lot of us in FEZ are working with marine invertebrates. But why? Aren’t these just weird worms that do nothing but crawl on the ocean floor? Not really, and I’ll try to explain why. From the 34 phyla of the Animal kingdom, […]

In October 2018, Vasily Radashevsky from the Russian Academy of Sciences briefly visited our collection to go through the material of Spionidae, marine worms of the phyla Annelida, the segmented worms. Vasily is very enthusiastic about spionids in all there facets and he is one of the world’s […]

After introducing the Artsdatabanken project and telling about our summer collection trips (Trøndelag and Oslo), it is time to present the six invertebrate groups that we are working with. From star ascidians to Christmas-tree worms, this seems to be the adequate time of the year to get to […]

By Alberto Valero-Gracia In this blog post I will briefly comment about our first field trip outside Norway, a trip done to sample at the Station Biologique de Roscoff (France). During this trip (3rd – 17th of September, 2021), my supervisor, Prof. Torsten Struck, and I, were able […]

The year 2021 was full of unexpected happenings and opportunities for both students, as in me Marianna Khodabandehlou and my fellow student, Sine Hagestad. We both were doing our last semester in our Biosciences degree and wanted to gain some hands-on experience before we began our Masters. We […]