On the way down: part 2

Kharis presenting her research at Arctic Frontiers. Photo by
Annkathrin Dischereit.

I parted from Kharis in Longyearbyen. While I headed straight home, she had plans to spend the weekend hiking with a friend and then attend a conference in Tromsø. 

Today, Kharis messaged me "Talk went well" and attached a photo of herself presenting. It was the news I had been waiting for. I was very curious how her presentation would be received, considering both the preliminary nature of the data and the context in which she was presenting. 

The conference is called Arctic Frontiers, and it's held every year in Tromsø. I presented back in 2019 and even participated in a parallel early-career workshop. I was excited for Kharis to have the same experience. Unfortunately, the workshop was cancelled this year, but she still got to experience the conference. Arctic Frontiers is really unique because it has not just scientific presentations but also panels on geopolitical issues and cultural events. It's something every Arctic researcher should experience in their career. 

Kharis's presentation was about larval specimens we had collected in 2021 on board R/V Polarstern. I've been trying for several years now to collect invertebrate larvae in the Arctic deep sea. Recruitment is extremely low there, so I wanted to back up a step and figure out what's going on with the larvae. Over the last 5 years, I've used larval traps and pumps to capture larvae in the deep. It's kind of been driving me nuts, actually - I've caught plenty of interesting things, but so far no larvae that I can match to any of the hard-bottom species I'm interested in. 

Kharis has taken ownership over the samples and started sequencing them in the lab. Our efforts have been slow and frustrating - that's the nature of genetics - but we've actually gotten some good sequences. Some of our specimens matched to different types of worms that live in the sediment, so that makes perfect sense. Other sequences have been less logical. What we thought might be a sponge has turned out to be a fungus (ok, I can't really complain about that one, because it's super cool to find an Arctic deep-sea fungus!), and what we thought was a soft coral had DNA that looked like a copepod. Kharis actually put a slide in her Arctic Frontiers presentation with a photo of that specimen and the caption "Do you know my mother?" Some individuals in her audience actually recognized it - as a dinoflagellate cyst. Another crazy find! 

I'm very glad to hear that Kharis's presentation went well, and I hope she enjoys the rest of her time at Arctic Frontiers!