The alien hunt has begun

Although you might think that the most likely time to encounter creatures from outer space is in a dark night, we started our hunt for aliens in Tjärnö on a rather sunny morning. Armed with tools and dressed in chic wading pants and wetsuits we went out to start our search for non-native marine species.

Ready to hunt…
We chose to take a closer look at a number of man-made structures, such as the pillars which hold up the jetties in front of the typical Swedish boat houses, as well as rocky beaches on the shore of the bay. In this way we hope to find out which factors facilitate the spread and colonization of non-native species in the bay.

Potential landing sites for marine alien species – the pillars of jetties and rocky shore  
As the marine aliens can be hard to identify in the wild, because in some cases the non-native species only differ in small characteristics from a native species, we collected samples in the field and took them to the lab for identification. So during the next days at the Sven Lovén research centre we will use microscopes and bury ourselves in scientific books to determine all the organisms we have collected so far.

Taxonomy,Taxonomy,Taxonomy
In the next blog post we will reveal if we could detect some aliens in Tjärnö Bay. So stay tuned and follow our alien hunt!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The importance of animal welfare in scientific research

Image
We thought it’d be nice to interview a few people from our research project to pick out different aspects of it. This is the first one. --> So Merijn, your university pathway is quite unusual, tell me a little about it. I started out as a philosophy student. At first I was mostly interested in political philosophy, but I quickly found a way to merge my passion for nature (and mainly animals) with my studies in the form of environmental philosophy. I wrote my master thesis on ‘the land ethic’, which is a philosophical doctrine trying to find  harmony between mankind and nature by finding a way to value nature for itself, instead of for the services it provides us with. I then did a Master of Science in Applied Animal Behaviour and Welfare at the university of Edinburgh, Something I took from there was the need for scientists, mostly biologists, to take into consideration the welfare of animals involved in scientific experiments, something that is not as obvious as it might s
Read more

Bye bye beautiful Tjärnö

Image
And here we are again! Our third and final blog… It’s been a hard couple of days since we last wrote to you. A lot happened…. And...between you and me, it wasn’t always pretty. In some moments we felt like social science students rather than marine biologist - studying, and fully experiencing, the weird behaviour of people working under loooads of pressure. As you guys probably know by now… we aren’t here just to have fun. We have to write a report on the research we have been doing on hydrodynamics. And due to us having spent a lot of time on data gathering and building our floaters, we did not have a lot of time left. Conclusion: we need to rush! More than planned… And not only Michiel was very sad about sleeping a bit less than planned. This of course means lots of pressure, working late and even skipping breakfast and lunch to get 2 more hours to write the report. Even after all of that, we were just in time (it practically came down to the second) for our 17:00 deadline. And
Read more

A Guide to Hunting Aliens

Image
Hello from Tjarno once again.  The hunting unfolds and we have decided to give you guys a crash course on Alien hunting!  Image 1+2 Astronauts vs Marine Biologists The idea behind this is to run through the basic skills you need to determine if there are Aliens around you. No, not the ones from outer space (yikes), the ones hiding below the surface of oceans where they have never been before coming from all corners of the earth (yikes).  For the marine environment it’s a bit tricky but fear not we are well equipped. Image 3 Well equipped   You will need to have: Scuba or swim suite (According to the region) Chic waders Transect Line or rope (to measure area) Quadrats ( 25x25 square) Sampling buckets Scrapers CTD Note book Boat ( if you want to be fancy)    Ok! So you have your gear, let’s go… We have selected 4 sites for comparison in our area, the beautiful Tjärnö Bay to do our sampling. We chose these different types of h
Read more