18 November 2021 news

Dive to the depths of the oceans to discover the hidden world of sea babies where microscopic baby seastars, crabs, sea slugs and others drift with ocean currents to find good places to grow up. A big job for such tiny creatures!

Babies of the animals that live on the ocean seafloor 🌊🐚🦐🦀🐙 live a more adventurous life then you might have imagined! This video created by Raphaelle Descoteaux (UiT) in collaboration with artists at Ice-9 (https://ice-9.no/), gives you a glimpse at the secret lives of these babies and how they might drive ecosystem change in the Arctic as the climate continues to warm.

The video describes the journeys of meroplankton and how a warming of the Arctic region may result of new species inhabiting this region. Meroplankton are juvenile, planktonic stages of organisms spending most of their lives on the seafloor. Having such a juvenile stage enables seafloor organisms normally having very low mobility to disperse broadly. This can help them reach new marine habitats, but also results in high mortality during the process. Meroplankton can be contrasted with holoplankton, which are planktonic organisms that stay in the pelagic zone as plankton throughout their entire life cycle (Source: Wikipedia).

The video: 

Funding

The outreach video is a result of research jointly funded by UiT the Arctic University of Norway, the Tromsø Research Foundation, the Fram Centre Flagship “Climate Change in Fjord and Coast” and the Fonds de Recherche Nature et Technologies du Québec. The ArcticPRIZE project and the Nansen Legacy project (Norwegian Research Council) contributed ship time for sampling.

Raphaelle Descoteaux from UiT - the Arctic University of Tromsø is also first author of a publication from the project, co-authored by Paul Renaud, Akvaplan-niva: https://internal-journal.front...