The polar night paper

Good morning and happy Friday! I'm excited to announce that today, my research is again appearing in print. This paper concerns larvae in the high Arctic during the winter, when it is dark 24 hours per day. 

The story of this research starts back in 2017. WHOI had a cooperative agreement with the Ocean University of China, and I was invited to visit Qingdao with colleagues to establish collaborations. Four of us - two from WHOI, two from OUC - came up with the idea to study ecosystems in Svalbard during winter, and our proposal was funded. We traveled to the research station Ny-Ålesund in January 2020 and spent two weeks collecting samples in all sorts of conditions. While we were there, strong winds caused an upwelling event and changed the properties of the water in the fjord. We noticed significant differences in the community of animals in the fjord after the upwelling.

Our samples got held up in Norway when the covid-19 pandemic started, and I had to convince WHOI to let me come into my lab during the lockdown to analyze them. Thankfully, the samples were still in great shape, and I was able to identify many of them. Our analysis showed two key things: 

1) There are more species with early life-history stages (larvae and young juveniles) in the polar night than I expected. Some species must be reproducing during the winter because we were even collecting embryos. 

2) Oceanographic conditions have a strong influence on the larval community in the high Arctic winter.

If you're interested, you can read more about these findings in our paper, which appeared online today in the journal Polar Biology: https://rdcu.be/cpHae