The last of the bivalves

Friends, it is an exciting day when a project gets finished! Recently, several volunteers have been cranking away on a labor-intensive lab project, and the process is now complete! I am very excited to see all their efforts result in a dataset. 

The project is all about change in the Arctic Ocean. As you probably know, the polar regions are warming much faster than the rest of the world ocean, but we have yet to grapple with what that means for biodiversity. In 2023, my graduate student, Kharis, and I decided to find out. She found an excellent scientific paper from the early 2000s about biodiversity of tiny animals living between sediment grains in a high Arctic fjord, Kongsfjorden. We were planning a sampling trip of our own to Kongsfjorden at the time, so Kharis suggested that we repeat the sampling design from that previous study. By comparing results, we could see how the Arctic environment has changed over two rapidly-warming decades. 

Two of the bivalve species we found: Astarte montagui and
Macoma calcarea.
We spent a solid 48 hours collecting and sieving mud from the bottom of Kongsfjorden. We fixed all our specimens in formalin for shipment back to the US. Our volunteers picked apart the samples, sorting animals from sediment grains, and then sorting the animals by species. We counted them. We photographed them. We identified them. We measured them. And now, some tubs of mud have turned into data. 

I am incredibly excited to see what the data reveal. So far, my impression is that the samples we collected in 2023 have far fewer individuals than my team had collected in Kongsfjorden in 2020, just a few years prior. It's hard to tell how they will compare to the early 2000s samples without running the numbers - but that is our next step! 

Utmost thanks to our volunteers for their help in the lab!

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