Author: cpansch

New project on Pathogenic Vibrio bacteria and mitigation strategies

We just got a project settled into the subject of Environmental and Marine Biology at Abo Akademi University with 8 Baltic Sea partners (co-funded by the EU BiodivERsA Call on “Biodiversity and Climate Change“ and the Academy of Finland):
Pathogenic Vibrio bacteria in current and future Baltic Sea waters – mitigating the problem (BaltVib)
Vibrio – potential human pathogens in the ocean – present a significant threat to human health and tourism already today and even more so in the ocean of tomorrow.
BaltVib aims to delineate the current and future Vibrio status in the Baltic and the Archipelago Sea, and will determine key factors regulating Vibrio occurrence such as presence of key ecosystem engineers, which may locally be seagrass beds, bladderwrack communities or mussel assemblages.
This knowledge may help identifying nature-based solutions for the Vibrio problem locally and therefore may help human health and tourism industry.
A 2-year postdoc position will be available at AAU from early 2022.

 

Fully funded summer 2021 project on heatwave impacts on seagrass ecosystems of varying genetic diversity

The importance of genetic diversity and small-scale environmental variability in shaping key coastal ecosystems

We are looking for a Bachelor/Master/Internship student skilled (or interested) in Benthic Ecology: The participant will join a larger-scale experiment run in summer 2021 at the Tjärnö Marine Laboratory, located on an island in the Kosterhavet marine national park, at the Swedish west coast 2 hours north of Gothenburg. Travel expenses and the stay in the guesthouse are fully funded.

See pdf for details: Master KVA Tjärnö Sweden

Ola Mohamed Nour defended her PhD

Congratulations Ola. A well-deserved PhD.

Ola defended her PhD last Friday in Kiel, on “The non-native crab Hemigrapsus takanoi in the south-western Baltic Sea: Population structure and sensitivity to salinity and temperature shifts”

Her first paper is published in Aquatic invasions: Ola Mohamed Nour, Meike Stumpp, Sonia C. Morón Lugo, Francisco R. Barboza, Christian Pansch (2020) Population structure of the recent invader Hemigrapsus takanoi and prey size selection on Baltic Sea mussels. Aquatic Invasions 15: 297–317 (DOI: 10.3391/ai.2020.15.2.06)

And more interesting science to come

Foto by M. Khosravi

New paper out testing how thermal variability affects key benthic predators

In this SciRep paper, we tested how different scales of thermal disturbance, from sinusoidal short-term cycles to seasonal and long-term temperature changes impact the sea star Asterias rubens and the crab Hemigrapsus takanoi, two key predators on dominant Western Baltic Sea mussel reefs.

We found strong impacts of long-term changes but sea stars also responded  to the very short-term thermal cycles, imposing additional stress to this species.

 

 

Fully funded summer project on heatwave impacts on seagrass ecosystems of varying genetic diversity

The importance of genetic diversity and small-scale environmental variability in shaping key coastal ecosystems

We are looking for a Bachelor/Master/Internship student skilled (or interested) in Benthic Ecology: The participant will join a larger-scale experiment run in summer 2020 at the Tjärnö Marine Laboratory, located on an island in the Kosterhavet marine national park, at the Swedish west coast 2 hours north of Gothenburg. Travel expenses and the stay in the guesthouse are fully funded.

See pdf for details: Master KVA Tjärnö Sweden