Mercury (Hg) is considered as a global threat which is emitted in the environment through natural sources or anthropogenic activities. Emissions of mercury decreased during the last decades because of the implementation of mitigation measures. However, with the ongoing climate change, ecosystems are directly (e.g., rising temperature) or indirectly impacted (i.e., altered ecosystem by e.g., invasive ...

Populations living close together in space are likely to experience more similar environmental fluctuations, and thus may display similar temporal changes in population parameters, in other words synchrony. Interspecific synchrony has implications for ecosystem stability, and highly synchronous populations and communities tend to have a higher risk of extinction. In this thesis, I used long-term ...

The Arctic Ocean is overwhelmingly forced by its lateral boundaries, and interacts with, the global system. For the development of nested conceptual models of the Arctic Ocean ecosystem we here choose the full pan-Arctic as our focal scale. Understanding the pan-Arctic scale, however, requires that we look at the underlying scales of its major components, by considering regionality, connectivity and ...

Marine ecosystems, and particularly fjords, are experiencing an increasing level of human activity on a yearround basis, including the poorly studied winter period. To improve the knowledge base for environmentally sustainable management in all seasons, this study provides hydrographic and biological baseline data for the sub-Arctic fjord Kaldfjorden, Northern Norway (69.7 N, 18.7 E), between ...

Thyroid hormone (TH) and estradiol (E2) direct seasonal switches in ovine reproductive physiology. In sheep, as in other mammals and birds, control of thyrotropin (TSH) production by the pars tuberalis (PT) links photoperiod responsiveness to seasonal breeding. PT-derived TSH governs opposite seasonal patterns of the TH deiodinases Dio2/Dio3 expression in tanycytes of the neighboring medio-basal ...

The ability to accurately determine the original source of invading species offers several powerful applications in invasive species ecology and management and may enable important information on the invading species in its native habitat. Lake Storsjøen in South-Central Norway was recently found to have been subjected to an illegal translocation of the European smelt (Osmerus eperlanus). The ...

Juvenile sea turtles can disperse thousands of kilometers from nesting beaches to oceanic development habitats, aided by ocean currents. In the North Atlantic, turtles dispersing from American beaches risk being advected out of warm nursery grounds in the North Atlantic Gyre into lethally cold northern European waters (e.g. around the UK). We used an ocean model simulation to compare simulated ...

An increased pressure of human activities that can introduce new infectious agents and therefore alter host-pathogen interactions, resulting in epizootics and biodiversity loss, challenges the Southern Ocean. Health status information and the potential effect of disease outbreaks in the Southern Ocean fauna is scare and evaluating the susceptibility to new infectious agents is decisive for its ...

Arctic wildlife is facing multiple stressors, including increasing plastic pollution. Seabirds are intrinsic to marine ecosystems, but most seabird populations are declining. We lack knowledge on plastic ingestion in many arctic seabird species, and there is an urgent need for more information to enable risk assessment and monitoring. Our study aimed to investigate the occurrence of plastics in ...

The muscle cells and extracellular matrices (ECMs) of two teleost-infecting blood flukes belonging to distinct evolutionary lineages of the Aporocotylidae (Digenea) were examined using Transmission Electron Microscopy. Four morphotypes of muscle cells were found in the freshwater species Sanguinicola sp., but were considered to be various developmental stages of a single cisternic type. In the marine ...