First of the year

Friends, we have had a very exciting start to the year in the Meyer-Kaiser lab! Two manuscripts reporting the results of our research have been published online!

The first manuscript is a short communication. Back in 2021, I deployed a lander in the Arctic deep sea to try and collect larvae of benthic invertebrates from right above the seafloor. It worked, and we collected a wide range of organisms. One of the specimens reminded me of a sponge larva, so I brought it home and sequenced it. It was not a sponge larva; in fact, it belonged to a group that I had never even heard of before. My not-sponge turned out to be an understudied deep-sea protist that had never before been collected from the Arctic Ocean - two different species, in fact. Even though I don't work on protists, I thought other researchers should know what we had found. The short communication reports on the occurrence of our weird protists in the deep Arctic, so other researchers can go look into them more. Our short communication was published in the Journal of the Marine Biology Association of the United Kingdom: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025315425100714

The second paper is a chapter of Kharis's dissertation. She just graduated with her PhD last November, and this is the third of her four chapters to be published (I'm so proud of her!). The study actually started in 2021, when another scientist at AWI caught some larvae in a net she had deployed by hand over the side of R/V Polarstern. I didn't even realize that hand net deployments were allowed, but I took inspiration from her study design and started collecting larvae! We got a few more individuals by borrowing the AWI scientist's net in 2021, but then we brought our own hand nets in 2023 and 2024. As the dataset accumulated, it became clear to both Kharis and me that there were clear patterns in the larvae - different species occurred in the eastern Fram Strait, near Svalbard, and in the western Fram Strait, near Greenland. We had to figure out why - and you can read our results for yourself in Progress in Oceanography: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pocean.2025.103656