The golden redfish Sebastes norvegicus is a long-lived commercial species of redfish in the North Atlantic. Excessive harvest through decades has led to a decline in the mature population in Norwegian waters, which is currently considered to be severely depleted. Accumulating genetic evidence suggest a more complex structure within the Sebastes genus in the North Atlantic, which has recently formed ...

The once pristine Arctic is now facing negative alterations with a rapidly changing climate, increasing human activity, and plastic pollution. Seabirds are intrinsic to the marine ecosystems, and in recent years, plastic ingestion by seabirds has been of increasing concern because of the potential negative impact on individual and population levels. The aim of this study was to investigate the plastic ...

Timing is everything for Arctic flowering plants. Early flowers might be destroyed by frost, while late flowers have less time and resources to mature fruit. With climate change, Arctic flowering phenology is shifting. Yet for many species, phenology studies only encompass the onset of flowering and lack baseline data on within-plant flowering times. I used the gynodioecious cushion plant Silene ...

Biotic interactions play an important role in the structure and dynamics of food-webs and may drive the spatial distribution of species. In the Arctic, spring snow-cover limits the availability of resources at a critical time for resident and migratory herbivores, which could lead to resource competition. This study takes a first step towards understanding the potential for competition between the ...

Cyanobacteria are an excellent source of bioactive natural products that can be used in the development of new medicinal drugs. The cyanobacterial genus Nostoc have proven to be prolific producers of molecules with exciting bioactivities, including anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, and anti-cancerous. This feature combined with the Nostoc’s complex life cycle and sizeable genomes make them interesting ...

Plastic debris are ubiquitous, and the Arctic is no exception. Despite the relatively low population number around the Arctic, abundances of microplastic litter are like those of the most polluted subtropical areas. Micro- and nanoplastics have been found in Arctic fauna, but due to constraints in methodology, measurements of nanoplastics in sea water have not been carried out yet. Micro- and ...

Southern elephant seals are abundant top trophic predators with a circumpolar distribution in the Southern Ocean. They spend up to 80% of their life at sea on long-ranging migrations to remote foraging grounds. During breeding and moulting they haulout on subantarctic islands. During these migrations they dive continuously to great depth, encountering various environmental conditions. They ...

Cetaceans are known to utilise the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a key topographical feature in the Atlantic Ocean, for migratory and feeding purposes. Passive acoustic monitoring was used over a one-year period (2007/2008) to identify cetacean vocalisations that occurred on a location near the Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone. Using species-specific vocalisations that have previously been documented in the North ...

Male humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) sing structurally complex songs traditionally associated with low latitude breeding grounds. This vocal behaviour is increasingly reported outside these areas. All singers in a given population sing the same version of a song that is constantly evolving with modifications on different levels within the song structure. This study provides the first detailed ...

Deep-sea sharks are little resilient to targeted harvesting and bycatch fisheries due to their life history strategy characterized by slow growth, late sexual maturity, low fecundity, and few offspring. The Northeast Atlantic component of Etmopterus spinax is an example of a species where substantial population changes in terms of abundances have occurred due to intensive fisheries induced mortality. ...