October 8, 2019 by Ellen Schagerström

European Aquaculture conference in Berlin Day 1: Macroalgae

It is always an uplifting experience to attend a scientific conference. Rooms full of people passionate about their work and, in my line of conferences, the life in the sea. As I am currently “out of office” from the seaweed research, doing a post doc at Gothenburg University, I find myself now in Berlin on the European Aquaculture Conference. It is interesting to see how different conferences are when there is also a strong market and business connected to the research. Here there are up to ten parallel sessions on everything from fish welfare, everything shrimp, genomics, and epigenetics to reproduction and broodstock management and macroalgae.

The first session I attend today is on aquaponics. This is the co-growth of fish, who excrete nutrients, with vegetables, who take up these nutrients. This is something we will see more of in the future, and I have been following the development of these techniques over the years. It was very interesting to hear how far the techniques have come today. There are now free download models that you can use to calculate how much algae you can grow together with fish, depending on what type of food you feed the fish. Super cool!

My favorite presentation was a small pilot study on feeding sea urchins with land grown vegetables (carrots, maize and soy) and then let sea cucumbers eat the waste and faeces. The experiment showed good growth in sea cucumbers and good gonad growth (roe sacks, the bits you eat) in sea urchins. The really good thing is that this shows that you don’t need fish meal in the diet, which has higher negative impact on the environment, and also the vegetables costs less than fish meal. From 9 euros of vegetables, they produced 25 euros worth of sea urchin roe and 40 euros of dried sea cucumber. This is the kind of presentations that gives me inspiration for my own research and also hope for the future food production.

A very interesting presentation by Luca Grosso on how to co-grow sea urchins and sea cucumbers using land-grown vegetables instead of fish meal.

After a few presentations, I ran over to the macroalgae section. Ironically enough, the talk entitled “Large-scale cultivation of seaweed in west Cork: An Irish success story” was cancelled. But there are representatives from the Irish seaweed industry in the exhibitor hall (and it is a huge hall full of companies), so I can go there later and see how successful they are.

Erik Malta from the Spanish aquaculture center (ctaqua) presented experiments on how to grow the green algae Ulva ohnoi (yes, actual name. Scientists can have a sense of humour) indoors in photobioreactors. Seaweed production have traditionally been limited to countries with traditional harvest, such as Ireland and France. But now other countries are also interested in producing seaweed, but how do you do this if you have little or no coastline suitable? The answer is land based. In this way you can produce large volumes of clean seaweed (no sand in your teeth there) and you can also monitor and to some extent control the nutrient quality of your produce. In this way you can optimize algae for whatever use you grow them for, be it animal feed, biofuel or human consumption. Green algae contain numerous types of oligosugars, as well as lipids (fat) which have a good market. This is underscored by the fact that most talks in this session is about farming green algae.

Saccharina latissima

Siv Etter fron NTNU in Trondheim told of her studies on ammonium uptake in juvenile sugar kelp Saccharina latissima near salmon fish farms in Norwegian fjords. The Norwegian fish farms produce a lot of waste that contaminates the water column, but could be a resource to macroalgae if some calculations and strategical thinking is applied. The study placed small sugar kelp in either nutrient enriched seawater of 7 different concentrations or “clean” seawater, so growth could be compared. The nutrients tested was nitrate, ammonium and a mix of both. The results show a remarkably quick uptake of ammonium by the kelp. In only a matter of hours, the kelp had taken up all ammonium in the test aquaria. They discovered that sugar kelp actual prefers ammonium over nitrate, and only starts taking up nitrate after the ammonium is depleted. This is an extremely interesting and important discovery that shows how integrated systems of several different species is the way to reduce negative environmental impact.

Sofiia Tretiak from Germany has studied how to optimize the antioxidant activity in sea vegetables (a lovely name for macroalgae) when they are grown in RAS (recirculating aquaculture systems). The role of antioxidants in an industrial perspective is to stop the deterioration of fatty acids in produce, as low degradation gives a much longer shelf life and thus reduces food waste. The algae in the study was placed either in normal or high salinity and either also desiccated for some time or not, so in total four different treatment. Measurements were taken for growth rate, where all but the control (normal salinity, no desiccation) decreased in growth. They also measured the photosynthetic activity, showing stress in all but control treatments as well. They then moved on to add light dosage to this. Seaweeds need a certain dose of light per day. They can either get a small dose over a longer period of time, or a high intense short period, the effect on growth will be similar if the total dose is the same. The experiment tried high and low level of light for shorter and longer periods of time. But if given a low level of light for a short time, an extra boost of UV light showed a much increased growth, whereas the same treatment without UV almost completely died. So, why did they stress the seaweed so much? Well, stress is what causes the production of antioxidants, so if you want a seaweed high in antioxidants, you need to stress it real good. There was however, no clear results here on if they actually did produce more antioxidants from these treatments or not.

The final talk before we got to stretch the legs and find some lunch discussed the European seaweed value chains in an international perspective. By now my brain was good and mellow, and this was way too much economy for me to understand fully, so I conclude by stating that it was interesting to see that the seaweed production is globally divided into three different “worlds” regarding how and why. China farms for food, very large scale but with low-paid immigrant work force that is ageing and the whole industry is low tech. This is contrary to Europe, where labour is expensive and technology readily available. But in China, humans consume lots of seaweed, which we still have not begun doing in Europe. Also, the Chinese market is very innovative, looking for new species, new products and new ways to use seaweed. We can really learn a lot from them, and maybe these two different worlds are less different than they seem, as Europe is slowly catching up.

All in all a good and interesting start to the conference. I shall now attempt to dive into the poster display and look at over 500 posters!

August 14, 2019 by Ellen Schagerström

Baltic Sea Science Conference 2019 in Stockholm

Next week, between the 19th to 23rd of August, the Baltic Sea Science Conference 2019 is held in Stockholm, Sweden.

This is THE conference for anyone working with the Baltic Sea, ecologists, hydrologists, geologists…you name it, they will be there.

Are you attending? If not, you can still check the programme and abstract book for the conference to get a good overview of the topics that will be discussed.

There will also be a workshop by the FunkVeg collaboration on free-living Fucus vesiculosus on the Tuesday 20th afternoon for anyone who is interested to hear more about the mysterious red-listed habitat that seems to be quite abundant in the Baltic Sea.

Free-living bladder wrack on a shallow soft bottom with vascular plants

February 17, 2016 by Ellen Schagerström

Nordic OIKOS poster sessions

The number of posters was very large and one poster presented by a PhD student won the award as the best poster, selected by the board of Oikos during the conference. This was number 100 with the title: “Ant larvae as a secret weapon against social parasites” by Unni Pulliainen. During the poster session lots of engaged presentations occurred.

Winner of “Best Poster Award”

Ben presents his poster

There were also a number of marine and aquatic posters, for some the author had the possibility to pitch their poster in 3 minutes.

Tiina Salo, now being on a post-doc, showed in her poster that Lymnea stagnalis responds more strongly to a heat wave after exposure to a mixture of micropollutants. But they recovered fast after the heat wave had passed. To feed the snails she used ecological salad. In the future experiments they will be fed leaves from different aquatic plant species.

Tiina (left) pitches her poster

Several posters presented different aspects on the hot topic “ top- down – bottom-up” regulation of different ecosystems and impact of cascading effects and interactions between species. One species that creates lots of emotions is the cormorant, when establishing large populations on small islands along the Baltic coast.

Top-down fish poster

Bottom-up cormorant poster

From the Department of Ecology, Environment and Evolution two posters were presented, one on the long-term effect of Pilayella on the settlement of Fucus vesiculosus by Susanne Qvarfordt and the other one presented results from a master project on the Swedish west coast about two closely related Littorina snail species behaviour when placing their egg sacs on different fucoid species.

6Pylaiella påverkan på etablering av blåstång

Susanne Qvarfordt show how the effects of Pylaiella can be seen for a long time in the macroalgal community

Our poster!

The last poster that I want to present was of high interest dealing with the new crab species, the mud crab, Rhithropanopeus harrisii and its impact on the local fauna. It is just a question when this crab will arrive on the Swedish coast. Keep your eye out for it.
8Mud crab introduced

The conference ended after three intense days.

9Thanks for the conference

September 25, 2015 by Ellen Schagerström

Final day at the EMBS

Well, it has been a very interesting and inspiring symposium, as the EMBS always is. We have been well fed, both with science, cake and drink by all the lovely organizers, who have worked very hard during the week.

Today, there were som interesting talks, such as that by Laura Kauppi from Tvärminne fieldstation in Finland. She presented how the effect of the invasive polychaete Marenzelleria spp. differs between shallow and deep bottoms in the Gulf of Finland. This is a species that we also have in Sweden, and it is important to know how it affects the ecosystem.

The very entertaining Trine Bekkby from NIVA in Norway held a very pedagogical talk on how to use models and when to top due to data deficiency. This was really nice, as many of us agreed on afterwards, since one often just hears the results, not much on hpw it is done “backstage”. Another nice thing is that Trine works on kelps, so the examples were interesting and there were some nice pictures of kelp.

Todays plenary talk was by professor Bernd Blasius, entitled The risk of marine invasion by global shipping. It is very interesting to see the maps of how different species have been unintentionally transported around the globe and how they have managed to either blend in or totally take over in different habitats. The most difficult part of this research is apparently to get the data over ship movement, and a lot of time is spent pleading with authorities, shippers and harbour authorities. There is huge amounts of work put into the maps and graphs presented. He rightly point out that if you show a diagram, perhaps some expert in a conference might be interested. If you make a picture, then the press will come. And, apparently, the U.S Navy. A very thought-provoking presentation. I wonder if the early seafarers ever envisioned the intensity of shipping that the oceans see today.

The conference closed with a very amusing summary of professor Hempel, who was a participant of the very first EMBS here on Helgoland 50 years ago. He reflected over the changes of the EMBS, saying it was now a younger, female dominated symposium, which was positive. He also mentioned the very nice presentation by Angela Wulff, and how micro organisms were now more popular, bridging the gap between organism biologists and molecular biologists.

Herman Hummel presented the poster and presentation prizes to PhD students, handed out by the MARS network and MBA. Mark Frost of the Marine Biology Association first presented the different memberships, urging all and sundry with an interest in marine biology to sign up as members. First prize of 250 EUR went to Norwegian collegue Ann Evankow and the two 100 EUR prizes to Merle Bollen and Christopher Gross.

And so, finally, this years Yellow Submarine was won by Russia, who made a huge gorgonian seastar, also honouring the biggest calstle (Team Asia) and most creative castle by Team Finland (although cleverly disguised as Norway during the award ceremony).

September 24, 2015 by Ellen Schagerström

Day 3 and 4 of the EMBS at Helgoland

Wednesday at week-long conferences is usually the day with excursions. Today, we started out with some talks in the morning, among them Alexey Sukhotin showing different studies done at the Russian field station Kartesh in the White Sea over the last 50 years. This was very interesting to us, as Lena went there in 1995 and we would like to return and do some experiments on their Fucus vesiculosus populations.
Also, Hartvig Christie held another talk on the Norwegian kelp forests and seagrass beds, this time on how they can survive being both food and habitat. This study clearly shows how fish help maintaining the kelp and seagrass by feeding on the any grazing gastropods and crustaceans that would otherwise prove too much grazing pressure for these ecosystems.

Since the sun was out and the wind was low, we went for a discovery trip up on the oberland, admiring the view of the North Sea horizon and the interesting geology of the island.

The red sandstone of Helgoland

We took our packed luch by the nesting colony of Northern gannet, Morus bassanus.

Nestng colony of Northern gannet

The birds seem not to mind the passing humans

It was rather sad to see how they have used plastic or nylon netting for nesting material. Several young birds have gotten entangled in the nets and died, so the colonies were draped with more or less mummified birds hanging from the rock.

Plastic as nesting material comes with a prize

Lange Anna, a monument to erosin by wind and waves.

After some mandatory selfies at Long Anna at the tip of the island, we walked back towards unterland, passing the local allotment area. Gardening here is very affected by the wind, but lots of dense hedges seems to do the trick.

The allotment gardeners have plenty of sun, rain and seaweed as fertilizer. Using hedges to screen out the wind makes for bumper crops.

In the afternoon, we took the boat over to Düne to look at the seals and browse the shores there for interesting finds. There are so many beautiful speciments of Laminaria hyperborea kelp here, and I would like to bring all of them home. Best not, I think. A kelp forest in a small appartment might not be such a good idea.

The beuty of kelp, even when washed on to the beach.

Typical dune landscape, with few but tough species

After enjoying the dune-landscape with its typical flora and falcons, we strolled to the southern beach, where the conference dinner and Yellow Submarine competition would be held. The Yellow Submarine has been running since 1968 and although its all in good fun, it is still a prestigeous prize to win.

The Swedish team compeating for the Yellow Submarine.
Nils, Lena, Ellen and Angela.

This year, we entered a strong team for Sweden, with no less than 3 professors and one fresh-from-the-oven doctor. Lena and Nils kautsky, Angela Wulff and yours truly worked hard, spinning around bottles, answering questions while building sand castles and collecting water (huge effort by aquatic gazelle Angela).

All the teams did very well and the winner will be announced later in the week. The evening ended pleasantly late after drinks and high spirits amongs all.

September 22, 2015 by Ellen Schagerström

Day 2 of the EMBS on Helgoland

After a crab-pizza for dinner and a good nights sleep, it is yet another day of interesting talks on the EMBS conference.

Another day of interesting talks!

Agnese Marchini from Italy presented her research on foreign visitors in Venice lagoon. There are 71 non-native species in this one lagoon, most came from Japan, but also Indo-Pacific and other origin. Most of these have been introduced by boats, as Venice is the main port for cruiseships in the Mediterranean. There are also oyster and clam farms, who import the ”seeds” from other countries, enabling hitchikers to sneak along. The pacific oyster Crassostera gigas was first introduced in 1966 and expanded enormously in the mid 70’s, still showing a high rate of expansion. The brown macroalgae Undaria pinnatifida and Sargasum muticum are also present, forming large floating mats in favourable condditions. Many species have been shown to be poly-vector spread, meaning that they might arrive on an oyster but then hitch a ride with another species to spread further into the Mediterranean. If you want to look for new species in a harbour, the wooden structures of for example the diktalbs is a very good substrate for first settlement. It is not possible to eradicate the new species in Venice lagoon, but it might be possible to prevent new introductions and contain those who are there, with good management measures.

Her collegue Jasmine Ferrario followed, in the same track, presenting her work as a PhD on investigating if harbours and nerby marinas share the same non-native species or not. Sampling one harbour and one marina each in three different regions by scraping gave 16 non-native species out of 260 total number of species collected. Some species are recent arrivals, such as a cute ghost-shrimp, and they also found 2 new species not previously found in the Mediterranean Sea. One of them was also first record outside the Pacific Ocean! Jasmines research show how recreational boating is a vector which helps spreading new species in the Mediterranean. Harbours do not seem to differ in species composition, being fairly similar, but marinas do. The results that the marinas had the same or even higher number of non-native species was contraty to what was expected, and an important finding for management of the non-native species in the Mediterranean Sea.

Anya Zalota from Russia then spoke of crustaceans, deapods in particular, found in Russian waters, pointing out that the far East is lacking information since it has not been studied. Many non-native species have been found, but not established, in Russian waters. The highest record of non-native species is of course the Black Sea, and the polar seas seem to have only native species. Taking previous speaker into account, this is only to be expected, since ther eis not much boating in the polar seas. Anya and her team are working in the Sea of Azov, just east of the Crimean, but also look at the distribution of the giant Kamchatka crab. They actually found one of these crabs in the White Sea, near the small marine station Kartesh in Chupa Bay, where we would like to go and looka at seaweed. There is also an ongoing expedition trying to determine the extent of the snow crab, which can be seen on the ”Deadliest Catch” TV-show. The invasions of snow crab seem to coincide with ice conditions the winter before a spread-phase. Although this crab can be caugth and used for human consumtion, there are worries that it is spreading too rapidly and might knock out the native Russian species. The best way of hindering an invasion is to fish it heavily, but one where other species are not damaged, the snow crab might be kept off the Russian shores.

Nadezhda Berezina from Russia, who I have met on several conferences, then showed data from the Neva estuary and the Curonian lagoon in the Baltic Sea and how these estuarine environments are affected by nutrient loads, looking at biomass of annual macroalgae such as Cladophora, Pilayella and Ulva, and also how these ecosystems are dominated by crustaceans. At the ice breaker event when we arrived here this Sunday, Nadezhda told me that she has observed how Fucus is now establishing on the southern coast of Gulf of Finland on the Russian side. This is very interesting news, and it might be worth the hsasle of getting a visa and permission to go there to make some observations and sample, so that the speed of establishment might be assessed.

Before coffee (and very nice cakes), Sabine Horn from AWI have investigated the rôle of birds in the Wadden Sea food web, asking which areas are most important for birds, how do they impact fodd webs and can they be used as indicators. The Wadden Sea is really shallow, with vast expamnses of mudflat containing different types of mussels and clams, seagrass meadows and lots of burrowing worms, all food for different birds. This is a very special area and I would like to go there, just to experience the flatness. The highest bird concentrations are found on the sand flats and the seagrass meadows, and Sabine show how the Wadden Sea food web has both top-down and bottom-up effects.

After coffee Markus Brand showed the composition of the shallow fish community in Kongsfjorden at Spitsbergen on Svalbard. A very interesting arctic gradient was present in the fjord, with warmer water coming in and being cooled by meltwater from the glacier. They do some diving there, which I also would like to, as they only sample during summer when they can access the fjord.

Stefanie Dekeyzer from WoRMS presented their new database World Register of Introduced Marine Species (WRIMS), wich is compiled by numerous experts and makes this data very accessible.

Shasha Wang is working with Martin Wahl at Geomar in Kiel, trying to determine if the invasive forms of the red algae Gracillaria vermiculophylla have stronger defense against fouling by the red alga Ceramium spp. She has compared Gracillaria from Germany and France, where it has been introduced, to specimens from the species’ natural range in China and Japan.

We were then very interested to hear from Torjan Bodvin, a Norwegian collegue, about the speed and rate with wich the pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas, is currently travelling up along the Norwegian coastline. Their rapid colonization might well be a problem, and I for one am ready to assist our dear neighbours by coming over to Norway and eat as many oysters as I can.

Main beach on Helgoland

We took our packed lunches and ate them on the pier by the beach, admiring the seaweed diversity on the breakwater structures. We then took yet another foraging walk on the beach, looking at what new species had been washed up since last tide. Today we found more red algae. I had expected several species of molluscs washed ashore, but so far there is only Gibbula sp, some Littorina obtusata and the odd fragment of Littorina littorea. Tomorrow we will walk on the other side of the island, perhaps there will be more shells there.

Studying seaweed from above…

and from (during high tide) below

Tuesday plenary talk was by Hans Otto Pörtner, who has an immense publication list and is very inspiring. He was adressing the impacts of climate change on ocean biology. The feeling was a bit bleak, as the numbers for human impact on the oceans is not very happy reading. However, one must not give up hope on the effects of good management, hightened awareness and alternative methods in fisheries etc.

This pretty much summarizes it

September 21, 2015 by Ellen Schagerström

The 50th European Marine Biology Symposium – back where it started.

The first marine biological symposium was held on Helgoland in 1965. Since then, it has been held in more than 20 different countries around Europé, som hosing it two or even three times.

Lots of laughs and interesting dscussions with EMBS veterans during the ice-breaker

The main topic this year focuses on long term trends, divided into subgroups of, for example, climate change, microplastics and anthopogenic influence.

The 50th EMBS was opened by professor Karin Lochte from Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), long time associated with both Helgoland and the EMBS, opened the conference by summarizing the history of this conference.

She pointed out the importance of long term studies, and the need for good methods that do not change over years, to have sites all over the world in order to compare, the need for technology to get high resolution data, and finally to consider how we use data and interpret it.

She was followed by professor Karen Wiltshire, the vice president of the AWI, who put Helgoland as a palce of science in a historical perspective. Reknown scientists such as Heisenberg, Alexander von Humboldt, Ehrenberg and Johannes Müller all spent time on this interesting rock far out in the North Sea, commenting on the interesting marine life. The first ”Königlich Biologischen Anstalt” was founded here in 1865, and there is the first photo of plankton nets together with, amongst others E. Heckel, who illustrated with much imagination, life in the seas.

She also told us that, when she first moved here (she’s been living here for 14 years) a local said ”Oh, are you working with those strange people? Make sure you don’t become too peculiar too, dear.”

Another local comment was ” I met an very nice italian scientist on that there conferenc you had some 20 years ago. It would be nice if you had one of them again”. The motif might not be one of science, but we felt very welcome all the same.

The mayor of Helgoland, mr Jörg Singer, welcomed us in a loving and amusing way to the island, saying that this island has probably the worlds highest PhD-density, but confessed that although the locals have no idea of what the PhD’s are doing, they are very important to the island community. The island has formerly been Danish and then British (who traded it with Germany for Zanzibar), and of course have been home to many smugglers. Today, the island is full of tax free shops selling alcohol, cigars and expensive watches, making smuggling a non-profit carreer.

The charming and inspiring renown scientist Victor Smetacek held a commemorative talk over the late Otto Kinne, born in 1923 who passed away in March.

Victor Smetacek speaks of the life and ambitions of late Otto Kinne

Otto Kinne got his PhD in Kiel, supervised by professor Adolf Remane, the founding father of comparative zoology, who hugely influenced zoology in Germany. Otto not only published his thesis in 1953, he also published no less than 15 papers, only 2 of which he was not single author. Victor rightly describes Otto as an übermench. Otto also instigated the Helgoland Symposium series, which were hugely popular, not least due to the cheap drink available on the island. This was the beginning of what then evolved into the EMBS. Otto Kinne also started one of my favourite scientific journals, Marine Ecology Progress Series (MEPS), which was edited by himself in his home for the first years. Today, everyone would like to publish in this journal, which is one of the most prominent in marine ecologyeveryone would like to publish in this journal, which is one of the most prominent in marine ecology.

Otto Kinne himself

The first session was on the theme ”Drivers of ecosystem change in marine/coastal ecosystems”.
Julia Meyer showed a very nice long time series starting in 1972, same year as the timeseries we will present tomorrow started. Her series was data on species composition shifts in epibenthic and demersal fish species in the Jade area. It was interesting to see a dataset similar to ours, allthough this was much more stable since only two persons have been collecting data over the years. Ours is done by students on the marine ecology course.

Rebecca Gladstone-Gallagher from New Zeeland presented some very interesting studies on the organic enrichment effect of microbethos by seaweed, seagrass and mangrove leaves in an estuarie. She is two years into her PhD, so no data is published yet.

Detritus enrichment of sediment makes for interesting studies

Alf Norkko, the head of Tvärminne fieldstation in Finland, held a presentation where he pointed out that the only way we can hope to solve the big questions is by working together, showing examples from the Baltic Sea that the Tvärminne group are working on, and presenting in different sessions here during the week. I look forward to listening to more of their findings.

Gil Rilov from Israel has setup a research facility near Haifa and is documenting the shift on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean from native species living on the tolerance limit of temperature, to now being more or less a vommunity of non-native species coming from the Red Sea via the Suez channel and taking over the rocky shores. There are some very interesting questons in the field of tolerance limits and species shifts regarding function and complexity.

Gil Rilov shows the changes in the eastern Mediterranean ecosystem

The session ended with a presentation by Sarina Jung, on where the biological limit of the Wadden Sea is, from a phytoplankton perspective.
After a quick luch, we went down to the shore to inspect the seaweed species richness. Happy happy found lots of Fucus vesiculosus, Fucus serratus, Ulva, Porphyra and Mastocarpus. The tideline of jetsam contained lots and lots of long, thick Laminaria hyperborea stipes and Desmarestia aculeata. Not much fauna, though. But found some Gibbula shells for the collection.

The first keynote speaker was Poul Holm from Trinity College in Dublin. His talk concerned integrated approaches to ocean management. He made some very good points on how we should not see ourselves as narrow specialists, that we should work on the translatory skills to get our results into society and that what drives us all is the curiosity. The need for cross-diciplinary research was highligted, how technical knowledge and natural science need to incorporate the social sciences and the humanities. Sometimes we do not need to restrictourselves to scientific data in order to make people understand the difference between right and wrong. The by now classic pictures of big bass fished in Florida in the 1950’s and the biggest catch of today (nothing bigger than 50 cm) really says it all. Presenting some quite depressing time series that date back to the 19th century, it is remarkable how much data can be found by going into historical archives of log books from fishermen, whalers and other users of the seas. Much of such data is today available on the Internet for those who are interested. Much is summarized in a paper on Marine environmental history, a subject which need more attention I should think. Check out the site http://www.tcd.ie/history/opp/ for more on this topic. We are learning, we are getting more ocean litterate, and we should focus on the solutions, not just highlighting the problems.

Continuing on drivers and responses to ecosystem change, Frithjof Moy from Norway gave an exciting talk on the effects of kelp harvesting in Norway, where mainly Laminaria hyperborea is harvested for alginates and the pharma-industry. The Norwegian kelp forrests have declined over the last 50 years, not only due to trawling but also due to grazing by sea urchins. In the middle of Norway, however, it has remained relatively undisturbed. So a couple of study sites have been established here in order to obtain background values. Trawling of kelps naturally affects the kelp biomass directly, but it does not seem to affect either fish or crabs . Two years after trawling the kelp has recovered, although younger and shorter. But here there can be seen a shift in the fish community, where codfish are absent and goldsinny wrasses are abundant.

Inka Bartsch then talked of fucoids! Yay! The intertidal flat of Helgoland is mainly composed of a dense Fucus serratus belt. On these flats, 140 sample points are measured twice per year, winter and summer, whereof 60 are on the Fucus serratus community. There was a large disturbance in 2007 with the Kyril storm, and Inka shows that the cover was restored to the before-density in about three years. Also, some very interesting data shows the self-enhancing restoration, where up to 25% och biomass is lost mainly in winter, whick makes way for new growth.
The understory community consists of coralline crustose alga, Chondrus crispus, Ulva spp and Littorina obtusata. There was a visible negative effect on the crustose algae efter the storm, showing how sensitive they are to high light levels. There was no immediate effect on the Littorina snails, who graze on Fucus, but the year after there was less snails around, perhaps due to lack of suitable substrate for eggs the year before. The ephemeral green algae Ulva spp. Increased, probably snce there was now much free space and also less Littorina snails around, since they also eat Ulva.

Dense Fucus cover on the Helgoland intertidal shore

Paolo Magni reported on the latest findings concerning the ecological function of the seagrass Nanozostera noltii beds in Venice lagoon.

All the way from Canada, Mathieu Cusson (showing some nice Fucus pictures) spoke of multiple effects of disturbance, looking at one of the worlds biggest estuaries, the St Lawrwnce estuary in Quebec, Canada. Here they have Fucus distichus edentatus and Fucus vesiculosus, which forms a cooling, protective layer for many understory flora and fauna, when viewed with a heat camera.
A really neat study of disturbance was performed, looking at resistance and resilience. I am so envious of those working on tidal shores, where it is so much easier to set up experiments. Not that I don’t like diving, but it does take a lot more time. This study shows that species richness is not a good measure for reslilience. Resilience was not affected by enrichment and grazer reduction alone, but interactive disturbance effects could be seen.

A neat field study. How pleasant to work on tidal coasts…

The always interesting Hartvig Christie appeared and spoke of regime shifts in Norwegian kelp forests to sea urchin grazed barrens. The extent of the loss in Norway is estimated to 200 km2 Saccharina latissima, for example, which naturally effects the associated communities. But the sea urchin communities have now collapsed. It might be due to higher temperatures, or that the urchin-eating crab Cancer pagurus, is moving north along the Norwegian coast. Experiments show that the increasing temperature has a direct negative effect on the sea urchins but also has a positive effect on the crabs, which in their turn negatively affects the urchins further. The loss of Saccharina might also be connected to increasing temperature, since it is a cold water species. It its also sensitive to poor light conditions, and the water quality has been reduced in the last years, which has increased the biomass of epiphytes on kelp, thus reducing light levels below the critical level for kelp survival. These large scale changes in kelp forest distribution are probably the result of complex interactions between multiple factors. Climate change have direct (temp) and indirect effects on the kelp communities.

Hartvig Chrisite discusses what drives the rise and fall of kelp survival

Jennifer Dannheim rounded off the day by talking of the relevance of red list species, asking the question if they are also rare species. They are not. Not all red list species are rare, and all rare species are not red listed.

May 14, 2014 by Ellen Schagerström

ECSA 54 Day 2

The Tuesday starts with the opening of a new topic “From genes to ecosystems: Effects of global change”. Keynote speaker is professor Filip Volckaert from Belgien, who talks about intraspecific biodiversity on a genetic level. Three years ago, I would have been lost at the first slide, but after having spent time hanging over the shoulder of my collegue Angelica Ardehed, who is the geneticist that extracts the DNA from all the seaweed i pull out of the water, I can follow the entire lecture. Thank you Angelica!

This was a really good keynote for the topic. Filip Volckaert lays the field for todays speakers really well, by going through the basics of genetics. This will save me some time, since I will have my presentation in this topic at the end of the day. Excellent!

Filip Volckaert summarizes genetica

During the following discussion concerning the need of biologists to also take courses in policy making, law and economics, Volckaert says “I live in Belgium, yes, but Brussels is abroad for me. I send postcards home when I go there.” A comment in true Groucho Marx-style.

First out of the presentations is Mike Elliot from University of Hull, who summarizes ”Conceptual models of the consequences of global climate change for estuaries and seas”. He kindly warns us that he will make our Brains explode with the amount of “horrendograms” he is about to show us. I myself rather like conceptual models, but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. We do, luckily survive, however. Many of the models are really good, but a Little colour never goes amiss. It is a brilliant summary of what needs to be done to achieve the EU’s marine framework directive. Mike ends by showing a slide of the ”to do”-list. I just wish politicians would understand how much work this will require.

“We only need to know all this to achieva good ecological status

Guillem Chust from Spanin follows with ”Vulnerability of estuarine species and communities under climate change”. He has inverstigated how a warmer climate might affect the distribution of the seagrass Zostera noltii along the Basque coast by coupling hydromorphological models with species distribution models. He presents how the seagrass’ distribution would change at two different scenarios, elevated temperature and elevated sea level, with reductions of biomass between 20-40 %.He also shows a neat setup where they are trying to recreate a seagrass bed by putting out boxes of sediment in which they have already planted Zostera noltii. I’m rather tempted to try that at home at the Askö laboratory, just for fun, with our Zostera marina.

Next presenter is an old friend from Tjärnö, Greg Charrier. He has been ther for five years, and we met at a CeMEB course where he was teaching genetic methods. Small world. Greg, who is now safely back in France, presents ”Integrative approach on the responses of a coastal fish to global warming”. They have worked with flounder (Platichthys flesus) which has turned out to be a good indicator for water quality and stress, along the French, Spanich and Portugese Atlantic coast. Using common garden experiments, they checked if the Southern populations, at the edge of its distribution, are more tolerant to warmer temperatures (heat stress) that the others. They have also tested the sensitivity to other chemicals (chemical stress) and low oxygen levels (hypoxic stress). Stress is measured by comparing the growth rate of small stressed flounders to non-stressed, and also by measuring different metabolic processes.

The research of Morgana Tagliarolo from Rhodes University focuses on what mechanisms Controls the distribution of the two bivalves Perna perna and Mytilus galloprovincialis (a relative to our blue mussel Mytilus edulis) outside the Namibian and South African Coast. Perna perna is the native mussel, and Mytilus galloprovincialis has arrived later and is considered invasive. Morgana has tested if they differ in metabolism, which means looking at who grows fastest and can thus compete better for space, and also if the metabolism differs at different temperatures. The South African coast is tidal, wich means that the mussels are pup in the air at low tide. Therefor they have measured both in water and in air, to get a true image of the mussels life. It is important that studies should have ecological relevans, something not everyone always remembers.

After coffee (mini-lunch) with a small cup of coffee a la Black Death, we take our seats again to listen to Adriana Verges talk on ”Climate-driven shifts in herbivory and the disapperance of kelp forrests in eastern Australia”. She focuses on what will happen when the herbivorous fish that keep the coral reefs in the tropical Waters clean from algae, moves into temperate Waters due to rising sea temperatures. On the coral reefs, the fish are the key to keeping the reef algae- free, so that the corals aren’t shaded or suffocated. But in temperate Waters, algae are the foundation species, providing the shelter as trees in the marine forrest. And they cannot withstand the intense grazing by the coral reef fishes.

Horror films for seaweed lovers

Inventories of the kelp forrests along Eastern Australia show that the kelp has been reduces since 2002. In some localities it’s been grazed to a barren. Adriana shows some film clips of where they hade put out kelp and filmed how soon fish and sea urchins, two notorius kelp eaters, finds and consumes the kelp.The research is part of a cooperation with amongs others Japan, who have the same problems.

B Duarte continues along the same line but up on land with ” The impact of extreme temperature events on halophytic vegetation”. Being halophytic means that you, as a plant, are able to grow in salty environments, and that in some cases even grow better there. The Camargue delta in southern France, for example is a very good place for halophytes.
These plants have to cope with growing submerged from time to time, which may cause low or no access to oxygen for the roots, sometimes there are periods of drought. A tough life. The results show that halophytes are generally not significantly affected by colder periods, but that extreme periods of heat causes a great loss of energy for this group of plants.

We return bavk into the sea and the macroalgae with the presentation of I Rodil, ”Effects of global climate change factors on macroalgae subsides and consequent impacts on sandy beach consumers” which shows that the sandy beaches are not the marine deserts as previously thought, because they are supplied with macroalgae from adjacent hard bottoms, allowing for a richer fauna. If the nutrient content of macroalgae would be negatively affected by climate change, this will in turn affect the faunal assemblage of the sandy shores. But how? Exciting research on Laminaria ochroleuca and Sargassum muticum follows, and is then connected to the sandy shore animals. A fun study in several steps to ensure the overall system is covered and links two different habitats.

It is always wonderful to see the beautiful images of marine organisms. The BalticSeaWeed blog is generally positive to algae, but there are times when they are not wanted. Aschwin Engelen does research on corals along the coast of Portugal and presents his group’s research “Temperate gorgonians during invasive seaweed proliferation and acidification preassure,” which shows how invasive algae are smothering coral. Most prominent is the invasive alga Asparagopsis armata . But corals are also grappling with problems with infections due to hot water and mechanical damage from fishing lines.

To really get a clear picture of what affects corals, they have also mapped all the microbes on corals (microbiome) by genetic sequencing. Apparently, many coral species have unique microbes that they do not share with other, closely related , coral species.

By exposing corals to different algae by allowing water from an algae to pass over the coral, they could see how microbes respond to the seaweed chemical signal by moving away. This could cause a lowering of the coral’s defense against epiphytes, which would allow the algae to attach to the coral. Exciting!

After a long lunch with a dip in the refreshing Atlantic Waves (16 degrees is not bad), we returned to the Conference to listen to the presentation with the best title: ”Photosynthetic sea slugs and global climate change: The role of kleptoplasty in a changing world”. Giselle Dionisio works with the wonderful Little green velvet sea slug Elysia viridis and has tested how the chloroplast that they take from the algae they feed on, survives at high temperatures. Cleptoplasty (stolen chloroplasts) is very complex and suprisingly Little is known about it, so it was a very interesting talk, and we had a great chat afterwards.

Cleptoplast – one of my favourite words

After a sugarhyped coffeebreak it was time for yours truly to proclaim the wonders of Fucus radicans and its sexual dimorphism (more on this over a pint or in the upcoming thesis).

Ellens presentation The magic World of Fucus radicans!

After ten minutes of presentation and a couple of good questions, we moved on about 50 meters down the road to the postersession, that was held in a Beautiful building with a tiled exterior, typical of Portugal.

Nice and very picturesque.

Cacophony is a rarely used word, but it describes well what erupted. 200 scientists in a small room with beer, wine fruit juice and tapas, and 60 posters that everyone want to read and discuss. Scientific mingle at its very best. Worth noting is that beer in Portugal comes in 20 cl bottles. That’s called a mouthful in other countries.

Really!

After mingling and chatting for well over two hours, we are now back at the hotel for a short rest Before dinner. Yesterday was the Day of Molluscs, today it will be Crustaceans.

May 12, 2014 by Ellen Schagerström

ECSA 54 – Coastal systems under change: tuning assessment and management tools 12-16 May Sesimbra Portugal

Waking up to the noise of the rolling waves of the Atlantic meeting the shore of Sesimbra bay is not a bad way to start a Monday.

This week, the BalticSeaWeed blog attends the ECSA54 conference in the lovely seaside town of Sesimbra, on the southern coast of Portugal. What a wonderful venue for a marine conference, indeed. Even though we spend most of the time indoors, it’s still nice to know that outdoors there is a sunny 20 degrees C waiting for you.

ECSA stands for Estuarine and Coastal Science Association, and is closely linked to the Elsevier scientific journal Estuarine, Coastal & Shelf Science, which publishes the papers from the conference in a special issue each year.

Men in suits The welcome comittee

We start the conference by the mandatory opening session with information, thanks to the sponsors, organizers and welcome by the Sesimbra mayor. There are 250 participants from more than 40 countries, which is a really good scope.

The first topic for the conference today is “Shifts in biodiversity and ecosystem functioning” which is opened by keynote speaker Anne Magurran from St Andrews University, Scotland. We are happy to see that of the invited speakers, there are more women than men. A first for me, hoping this positive trend will last. Anne takes us from Darwin and his observations of species richness and abundance and explains how ecological communities’ richness changes over time. She uses a data set from the Bristol Channel as an example, where scientists have sampled fish in the water intake mesh to a power station every month for 33 years! What a data set! (If you want to read some nice fish papers, look for Magurran & Hendersson 2003 Nature, 2011 Phil. Trans. or 2012 PRSB, and Shimadxu et al 2013 BMC Biology).

Anne Anne Magurran shows interesting and thoughtprovoking data

This data set really provides good background for community modelling, which will come up in the program several times during the week. I will be interesting to see if anyone has as good a background data as this. After showing the natural changes in the system, Anne moves on to speculate on how much chance is caused by human impact. She concludes that the consequences for ecosystem functioning is yet to be understood, and this should be a future area of research.

After this very inspiring talk, we move on to three fish presentations. First out is Felipe Martinho from Portugal, presenting “How well do fish community-based measures of ecological quality track change over time? The role of anthropogenic vs climate-driven pressures.” He and his research group have made an Anthropogenic Pressure Index (API) and tested it on local data from 2003 an forward. He presents a decreasing trend in anthropogenic pressure for their estuary, which is nice to see for a change, also that 2006 was a dip in diversity. It would be very interesting to see if this dip can be seen at a larger scale. He ends by pointing out the need for data, and to point out that some pressures will not be measured if they do not significantly affect the biota due to, for example, too low levels.

Prabath Jayasinghe from University of Cadiz, Spain, presents “Links between descriptors of good environmental status (GEnS): Commercial fisheries and marine biodiversity”. The goal of the European Marine Framework Directive is to maintain a good environmental status through high biodiversity. So, what are the pressures from commercial species fisheries on marine biodiversity? This is actually not very well known. Dismantling all the different factors used by the DPSIR Framework to analyze the impact of commercial fishing, and where their data comes from, we see that there are gaps, and quite large ones, too.

Some of the major points are the impacts of bottom dredging and trawling, which destroys so much more than just what they are after, the destruction of macrophytes, which are important nurseries, and several depressing numbers (and photos) on the amount of turtles (60. 000 die each year in ghost nets in the Mediterranean Sea alone), sharks and sea birds that fall victim to long lines, nets and other plastic debris. We need to define which pressures we can do something about, and do it!

Last out before coffee is Rita Vascaconselos from Portugal, presenting her work on “Worldwide patterns of fish species richness in estuaries: Investigating the effects of spatial scale”. Estuarine environments have less species than the adjacent marine environments, and have the gradient from freshwater to marine waters (ecotone/ecocline). Rita has compared data from 130 estuaries around the world, based on ecological realm (salinity) within the estuary, between continents, water temperature and precipitation (which is a factor that has a much larger impact on estuaries than marine environments and must not be forgotten). The take home message is the overwhelming importance of considering different spatial scales and biogeography to quantify important predictor variables.

After discovering that coffee in Portugal means lunch (with meat pies and sweet cakes) and the coffee is made cup by cup by a barrista (oh joy), we trotted down the narrow sunny street to the smaller venue for next session.

coffee Nice and sugary! But where is the coffee?

JN Franco showed how the kelp Laminaria ochroleuca has decreased in distribution and abundance along the Portuguese coast, and presented his research on the top down (grazing) and bottom up (nutrients) effects that might cause this. Also, the effect of high temperature on growth was tested.

Copper in the sea is both of man made and natural origin, but is toxic in the ppb (parts per billion) for some organisms. E Davarpanah have tested if the micro plastic particles that are littering the oceans, in any way change the toxicity of copper on marine organisms. The results show that micro plastics are having large effects on whole ecosystems, and although the tested concentrations were low, there are toxicological interactions.

A comparison of models

Rui Gaspar finishes the kelp session with “The use of biodiversity surrogates to describe intertidal macroalgae patterns at small spatial and temporal scales”. The idea is to reduce costs and the need for taxonomic expertise in species rich surveys, previously elaborated upon by Steneck and Dethier 1994, Orfanidis et al 2011, Balata et al 2011 and Smale 2010, and find surrogates that are more easily monitored. Surveys were made, using 50×50 grids on transects through gradients. Each grid was photographed and fed into GIS to get % cover and mean cover per species. Comparing this model to previous ones, this one seems to have a much better resolution as a taxonomic surrogate for family, but not order, and the is not as effective as the model by Seneck and Dethier, so, all in all, maybe one should focus less on time-is-money and just get down and do the work?

With more than 2 hours until next session, and not really hungry for lunch, there was only one thing to do.

Poolside Another Monday at work

March 10, 2014 by Ellen Schagerström

Guest blog from the 15th Scientific Conference of the Section Phycology

At the end of Feburary, our German collegue Balsam Al Janabi attended the 15th Scientific Conference of the Section Phycology, organized by the German Botanical Society. We persuaded her to tell us about it as a Guest Blogger.

The 15th Phycology seminar took place in the beautiful marine museum of Stralsund from 23rd until the 26th of february 2014. Members from the Phycology Section of the German Botanical Society and other researchers presented a huge variety of phycology research. Organized by the University of Rostock, Prof. Dr. Ulf Karsten lead us through 59 oral presentations and 2 poster sessions, so that about 100 scientists had the change to know the research of almost all phycological disciplines and to establish contacts. English presentations were held from Bachelor-, Master-, PhD-students and Professors from Austria, Ireland, Greece, Netherlands, Mongolia as well as all over Germany, especially Kiel, Rostock, Cologne and Constance.

Phycological presentations
Eleven structured sessions, brought the audience through different principle topics with special secctions of Polar and high Alpine Phycology, the Bioacid project and a presentations in memorium to Prof. Dr. Dieter Mollenhauer (who passed away May 2013) and in honor to his contributions to his activities to promote phycology in Germany.

The antarctic research session included fascinating sessions showing the kelp system in the Antarctic seaweed system with regard to global change revealing biomass and biodiversity changes up to ecotypic differentiation. Stecher, winner of the best talk award, brought the audience below the ice of the Arctic and the DNA- and RNA of sea ice algal communities. Besides future research, also insights into the past were discovered by means of Paleolimnological studies: radiocarbon-dated sediment revealed informations about diatoms, pollen and geochemical proxies up to the Neolithic period. Analysis of biodiversity was another focus of the seminar, as for instance the diversity of the rain forest in equador. Physiological aspects, as the light regulation in diatoms explained the role of aureochromes and cryptochromes by gene silencing methods. Other approaches from terrestrial habitats revealed transcriptomic analysis as in Klebsormidium crenulatum with regard to the physiological performance under desiccation stress. Investigations about microphytes were often interesting in this seminar, as during the applied phycology session, showing the usage of algae for biogas production. The variety of disciplines was also shown by a presentation about the BIOMEX project illustrating not only the laboratory analysis of space conditions for cyanobacteria, algae and even mosses, but also the planned analysis in the international space station (ISS).

Seaweed research
The Bioacid session focused on the climate change scenaria from mesocosm experiments in the Kiel Benthocosms, a near-natural scenario analyzing a seewead community as including an experiment on the interaction of environmental stress and genetic diversity of Fucus vesiculosus. Also bacterial communities of the biofilm between the present and future scenario are compared. Fucus vesiculosus was also analyzed for their seasonality of defense as a response to the seasonal variation of micro- and macrofouling pressure. Furthermore, the gen expression under herbivore grazing was demonstrated for Fucus vesiculosus. Also other physiological aspects of brown macroalgae (Phaeophyceae) showed the iodine to salinity response in Laminaria digitata and mechanisms of photoacclimation of the giant kelp Macrocystis pyrifera revealed the relation of antioxidants with the depth at which algae appear. The role of two bacteria for morphogenesis was presented for the green algae Ulva mutabilis.

Networking and Award Ceremonies
Future network was supported by talks about the GBIF database for algae and protists as well as by insights in the SAG culture collection. During the award ceremony of best poster, Algological study and E.G. Pringsheim-Prize, the winner of the ‘Hans-Adolf von Stosch Medal’ was Prof. Dr. Michael Melkonian for his great contributions in Protistology and Phycology. He shared his experiences of decades of phycological investigations as well as appreciated cooperations.
Personally I appreciate the participation of the phycology seminar, especially due to the mixture and the connection not only of disciplines, but also of specialists and opportunities as a PhD student having the chance to discuss my methods and results with during a nice coffee brake.
//Balsam Al Janabi

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