Shiroi Suna no Aquatope (白い砂のアクアトープ) is a new anime by P.A. Works that started airing in the summer season of 2021 (Fig. 1). In a broad sense (to avoid spoilers), the anime focuses on the daily life of the staff working in a small aquarium in Okinawa. Its official title in English is The Aquatope on White Sand and, from this point on, we’ll refer to it as Aquatope for simplicity.

Anadromous brown trout (sea trout), Salmo trutta, is currently in decline throughout its range, largely due to anthropogenic stressors in freshwater and marine habitats. Acoustic telmetry was utilized to study the marine migration of sea trout post-smolts from three populations in a relatively pristine subarctic fjord system. While at sea, the sea trout spent a substantial part of their time close ...

As Arctic sea ice deteriorates, more light enters the ocean, causing largely unknown effects on the ecosystem. Using an autonomous biophysical observatory, we recorded zooplankton vertical distribution under Arctic sea ice from dusk to dawn of the polar night. Here we show that zooplankton ascend into the under-ice habitat during autumn twilight, following an isolume of 2.4 × 10⁻⁴  ...

Amid the alarming atmospheric and oceanic warming rates taking place in the Arctic, western fjords around the Svalbard archipelago are experiencing an increased frequency of warm water intrusions in recent decades, causing ecological shifts in their ecosystems. However, hardly anything is known about their potential impacts on the until recently considered stable and colder northern fjords. We ...

Climate change and pollution resulting from human activities in the Arctic require reliable monitoring systems in sentinel species. Mytilus spp. are used as sentinel species all around the world. The use of Mytilus spp. in environmental monitoring requires knowledge about natural variations in pollution biomarkers. Seasonal variations in baseline levels of biomarkers were studied over a year in the ...

Changes in abiotic and biotic factors between seasons in subarctic lake systems are often profound, potentially affecting the community structure and population dynamics of parasites over the annual cycle. However, few winter studies exist and interactions between fish hosts and their parasites are typically confined to snapshot studies restricted to the summer season whereas host‐parasite dynamics ...

The highly seasonal anadromous Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus) was used to investigate the possible involvement of altered gene expression of brain neuropeptides in seasonal appetite regulation. Pro-opiomelanocortin (POMCA1, POMCA2), Cocaine and amphetamine regulated transcript (CART), Agouti related Peptide (AgRP), Neuropeptide Y (NPY) and Melanocortin Receptor 4 (MC4-R) genes were examined. The ...

Environmental change can have a significant impact on biogeochemical cycles at high latitudes and be particularly important in ecologically valuable fjord ecosystems. Seasonality in biogeochemical cycling in a sub-Arctic fjord of northern Norway (Kaldfjorden) was investigated from October 2016 to September 2018. Monthly changes in total inorganic carbon (C_T), alkalinity (A_T), ...

The rapid decline of Arctic sea ice makes understanding sympagic (ice-associated) biology a particularly urgent task. Here we studied the poorly known seasonality of sea-ice protist and meiofauna community composition, abundance and biomass in the bottom 30 cm of sea ice in relation to ice properties and ice drift trajectories in the northwestern Barents Sea. We expected low abundances during the ...

Due to retreating sea ice and predictions of undiscovered oil and gas resources, increased activity in Arctic shelf sea areas associated with shipping and oil and gas exploration is expected. Such activities may accidentally lead to oil spills in partly ice-covered ocean areas, which raises issues related to oil spill response. Net Environmental Benefit Analysis (NEBA) is the process that the response ...