29 August 2023 blog
By Frida Cnossen and Ingvild Ytterhus Utengen, Akvaplan-niva
Greetings from 78 degrees North! We have just spent 12 days on a research cruise for the PolarFront project onboard RV Helmer Hanssen collecting and identifying a variety of macrozooplankton and pelagic fish. We have also looked at fish stomachs and collected samples for stable isotope analysis to study trophic interactions.
Lars Ursem with a tucker trawl for collecting zooplankton and other small marine organisms (Photo: Frida Cnossen/Akvaplan-niva).
Lars Ursem and Ingvild Ytterhus Utengen sorting fish (Photo: Frida Cnossen/Akvaplan-niva).
On the most interesting station we captured 43 kg of jellyfish. The total amount of jellyfish caught at our 9 stations is approximately 300 kg and the biggest individual was 6.9 kg! Our fish group has unintendedly become jellyfish experts and might start a skincare production (change in career?) in a few years.
Frida Cnossen is amazed by the size of the biggest jellyfish caught. It weighed 6.9 kilos! (Photo: Akvaplan-niva)
Besides an outstandingly large number of jellyfish, we have also captured capelin throughout all stations. In Polar Water we have sampled young-of-the-year Polar cod and some other subarctic species including Atlantic cod, Saithe, and several species of fish larvae.
Different sizes of fish (Photo: Frida Cnossen/Akvaplan-niva).
Fulmar eating jellyfish (Photo: Frida Cnossen/Akvaplan-niva)
About the PolarFront project:
The PolarFront project is financed by the Research Council of Norway. It is led by Akvaplan-niva (project leader Paul Renaud) and partners are UiT the Arctic University of Norway, the Norwegian Polar Institute, Scottish Association for Marine Science, Memorial University, the Institute of Oceanology – Polish Academy of Science, Equinor og ConocoPhillips.
