Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) is a non-invasive method providing high- resolution information about marine mammal acoustic presence. Multi-species PAM studies can increase our understanding of temporal changes in species diversity and assemblage and is especially useful in remote areas such as the Southern Ocean. This study was based on 16 months of acoustic data spanning two austral autumns and ...

Crumb rubber (CR) produced from end of life vehicle tires is widely used on artificial sports fields and to create urban artificial surfaces. It is also used as a surrogate for tyre wear particles in experimental studies simulating the behaviour and effects of car tyre particles in the environment. It is known to contain a wide range of organic chemicals and metals, some of which are only just being ...

Car tire rubber particles (CTRPs) are a major source of microplastic pollution to the environment, originating from abrasion during driving or the use of crumb rubber granulates made of discarded tires. However, large knowledge gaps remain regarding the distribution and presence of CTRPs in marine environments and interaction with marine organisms. The aims of this thesis were to investigate the ...

Fjord and shelf food webs are frequently supplemented by the advection of external biomass, which in high-latitude seas often comes in the form of lipid-rich copepods that can support a wide range of fish species, including Northeast Arctic cod (Gadus morhua). A seasonal match or mismatch at the lower trophic levels (phytoplankton and zooplankton) is central in determining how much energy and biomass ...

Herbivorous rodents in boreal, alpine and arctic ecosystems are renowned for their multi-annual population cycles. Researchers have hypothesised that these cycles may result from herbivore–plant interactions in various ways. For instance, if the biomass of preferred food plants is reduced after a peak phase of a cycle, rodent diets can be expected to become dominated by less preferred food plants, ...

Spekkhoggere og knølhval i norske farvann følger den pelagiske fiskeflåten og beiter på fisken som blir samlet sammen av nøtene. Disse interaksjonene har ved flere anledninger ført til skade eller død av hval, og fangsttap og ødelagte redskap for fiskerne. Målsetningen i dette prosjektet var å kartlegge og teste utstyr og metoder som kan bidra til å redusere uønskede interaksjoner mellom spekkhoggere ...

The Barents Sea is a highly dynamic and productive marine ecosystem and a hotspot of global warming. Variability in sea ice extent is a common feature in the Barents Sea with substantial movements of the sea ice edge on short-term, seasonal to interannual time scales. Historically the northern Barents Sea (north of 75◦N) has been ice-covered in winter, but recently it has become the area with most ...

The highly rhythmic environment caused by the rotation of the earth has driven the evolution of an intrinsic timekeeping mechanism in most organisms known as circadian clocks. As climate change drives the expansion of southern species into northern latitudes, their circadian clocks are challenged by the novel light conditions they encounter. In contrast to the clear day and night in southern latitudes, ...

Climatic warming has been hypothesized to accelerate organic matter decomposition by soil microorganisms and thereby enhance carbon (C) release to the atmosphere. However, the long-term consequences of soil warming on belowground biota interactions are poorly understood. Here we investigate how geothermal warming by 6 °C for more than 50 years affects soil microbiota. Using metatranscriptomics we ...

The cosmopolitan apex predator killer whale (Orcinus orca) is one of the species worldwide with the highest levels of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in their tissues. The knowledge of how POPs may affect the species is limited, likely due to the ethical, legal, and practical challenges of researching toxicology on free-ranging marine mammals. The use of in vitro models has proved to be a ...