Prøveforelesning og disputas - MSc in Biology Snorre Flo

Later, at 12.15 he will defend his thesis entitled:

"On the appetites of small copepods and nematodes in the Arctic Barents Sea and Nansen Basin: In situ trophic interactions revealed by brute force prey metabarcoding"

Associate Professor Christian Selbach will lead the disputation.

Popular Science Summary:
This thesis is about the development of a novel molecular approach for describing the trophic species interactions, and using said method – we performed two studies to better understand the interactions of small marine copepods and nematodes in the Arctic. The method, dubbed “brute force” DNA metabarcoding, performed well, with output data succeeding that of contemporary alternatives. Our results on food interactions indicate that both small copepods and nematodes find food from a broad variety of eukaryote sources including microbes, marine fungi, and animals. Although the copepods employed distinct feeding strategies, and nematodes were separated by morphological feeding traits, we observed that prey compositions were better explained by seasonal factors. This suggest that small Arctic invertebrates have developed trophic plasticity, which may be an important adaptation to the extreme seasonality of the marine Arctic.

Evaluation Committee:

• Professor Monika Quinoes Winder, Stockholm University, Sweden (1. opponent)
• Dr Jens Nejstgaard, Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Germany (2. opponent)
• Associate Professor Christian Selbach, Department of Arctic and Marine Biology (internal member and leader of the committee)

Supervisors:

• Professor Camilla Svensen, Department of Arctic and Marine Biology
• Associate Professor Anna Vader, UNIS
• Professor Bodil Bluhm, Department of Arctic and Marine Biology
• Professor Kim Præbel, Norwegian College of Fishery Science

Streaming:

Both the defense and the trial lecture will be streamed and recorded from UNIS:

• Prøveforelesning og disputas Snorre Flo

Thesis:

The thesis is available through Munin