Atlantic cod Gadus morhua L. is host to more than 120 parasite species. Background abundance of these parasite species on adjacent wild hosts determines the infection pressure on cod farmed in open pens. In 2006, 2007 and 2008, 343 cod were collected from 4 locations along the coast of Norway: Øksfjord, Kvarøy, Brønnøysund and Ålesund. Freshly killed wild local cod, wild migratory cod, hatchery-reared ...

The outbreak of COVID-19 has had an enormous impact on most of society. The most effective measure to prevent the spread has been reducing mobility, which is especially problematic for pastoralists relying on mobility to follow the movement of their livestock. We investigated to what degree Norwegian reindeer husbandry and the reindeer husbandry management system are affected by COVID-19 and government ...

The substantial productivity of the northern Norwegian Sea is closely related to its strong mesoscale eddy activity, but how eddies affect phytoplankton biomass levels in the upper ocean through horizontal and vertical transportmixing has not been well quantified. To assess mesoscale eddy induced ocean surface chlorophyll-a concentration (CHL) anomalies and modulation of eddywind interactions in ...

Tourism and nature-based recreation has changed dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. Travel restrictions caused sharp declines in visitation numbers, particularly in remote areas, such as northern Norway. In addition, the pandemic may have altered human-nature relationships by changing visitor behaviour and preferences. We studied visitor numbers and behaviour in northern Norway, based on ...

Demographic buffering and lability have been identified as adaptive strategies to optimise fitness in a fluctuating environment. These are not mutually exclusive, however, we lack efficient methods to measure their relative importance for a given life history. Here, we decompose the stochastic growth rate (fitness) into components arising from nonlinear responses and variance–covariance of demographic ...

The degradation mechanisms of faecal pellets are still poorly understood, although they determine their contribution to vertical fluxes of carbon. The aim of this study was to attempt to understand the microbial (bacteria and protozooplankton) degradation of faecal pellets by measuring the faecal pellet carbon-specific degradation rate (FP-CSD) as an indicator of pellet degradation. ‘In situ’ and ...

Benthic communities below the photic zone are largely reliant on the export of surface-water primary production and the flux of partially degraded organic matter to the seabed, i.e. pelagic−benthic coupling. Over the past decades, however, the role of chemosynthetically produced carbon in food webs has been recognized in various habitats. Cold seeps are now known to be widespread across circumpolar ...

Climate change and harvesting can affect the ecosystems' functioning by altering the population dynamics and interactions among species. Knowing how species interact is essential for better understanding potentially unintended consequences of harvest on multiple species in ecosystems. I analyzed how stage-specific interactions between two harvested competitors, the haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus) ...

Light spectral quality is known to affect flavonoid biosynthesis during fruit ripening. However, the response of fruits to different light conditions, when ripening autonomously from the parent plant (detached), has been less explored. In this study, we analyzed the effect of light quality on detached and naturally ripening (attached) non-climacteric wild bilberry (Vaccinium myrtillus L.) fruits ...

Distinct swarms of Bosmina longispina (Leydig, 1860) (Crustacea: Cladocera) were visually observed and described in Gjøkvatn, a Norwegian forest lake at 69°N, in 1969 and again in 1996 and 2021. The repeated observations after many years show that Bosmina swarms occur regularly in the lake. The swarming is likely to be an anti-predation behaviour against the predatory cladoceran Polyphemus pediculus ...