The polar night paper

Friends, today, a new paper describing results of my lab's research has been published in The Biological Bulletin! This paper stems from the trip to Svalbard that my grad student, Kharis, and I made in January 2023. At 79 N, we experienced 24-hour darkness while collecting larvae. This period of the year is called the polar night and has a profound impact on the marine ecosystem. Contrary to expectations, we found a high diversity of larvae during the polar night. Our experiments showed that some larvae were even actively feeding or competent to settle. The polar night is an active period! This research sparked a lot of questions about adaptations of the species we found to extreme environmental conditions. I am proud of the study that Kharis and I did! 

You can read our paper here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/736174

For a more accessible explanation of our research, check out this episode of Changing Seas: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxKs0AHdTDU