Colonization in slow motion

Friends, I am proud to announce the publication of another of my scientific papers! This article, published in the journal Limnology and Oceanography, describes the results of a long-term colonization experiment in the Arctic deep sea. In 1999, my German collaborators at the Alfred Wegener Institute placed a metal frame on the seafloor with settlement plates made from plastic and brick. The frame was visited in 2003, then again in 2011 (I was on the ship that year), and finally recovered in 2017.

I told you about recovering the frame when I was at sea in 2017 and described some of the most common species that were living on the panels. Then I recounted my disappointment when the 2003 panels could not be located in storage at the AWI. However, I was able to use ROV video footage, recorded observations, and my own counts of organisms on the 2017 panels to craft a great manuscript.

Find the full paper here: https://aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/lno.11160

The AWI also put out a press release describing the study, available here: https://www.awi.de/en/about-us/service/press/press-release/colonisation-in-slow-motion.html

Our findings have been covered by Ecology Daily News and ECO Magazine.

Comments