Viral infections are a leading cause of mortality in the farming of Atlantic salmon in Norway. Viral outbreaks cause heavy losses each year, and one of the most predominant viral diseases is infectious pancreatic necrosis (IPN). The virus causing this disease, the infectious pancreatic necrosis virus (IPNV), belongs to the Birnaviridae family of viruses with a double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) genome. ...

Predation is an ecological process that relies on spatial and temporal co-occurrence of predators and their prey. In marine ecosystems, killer and humpback whales are considered sentinels of ecosystem health, given their critical roles as top predators in shaping marine food webs and their responsiveness to ecosystem changes. As they are seldom influenced by natural threats, they are model species ...

My thesis ‘The influence of snow cover and cold-season temperatures on growing-season processes’ is treating the ongoing trend and future projections of increasing snow cover thickness during the Arctic winter. More snow means two things: warmer soils during winter and later melt-out in spring. Both are important changes for Arctic terrestrial ecosystems, since warmer soils will increase CO2 emissions ...

Small rodents are key herbivores of arctic ecosystems, where their cyclic population dynamics have important implications for vegetation dynamics. The role of vegetation for shaping small rodent population dynamics remains, however, unclear. Evaluation of this interaction has been greatly hampered by the rather fragmentary knowledge of small rodents feeding ecology, which in turn is due to methodological ...

Across Arctic charr’s Holearctic distribution we see repeated patterns where multiple ecotypes diverge along ecological resource gradients. Arctic charr occur in both anadromous and lacustrine forms. Furthermore, lacustrine ecotypes are seen repeatedly specializing their morphology, trophic ecology, and life history along a benthic pelagic axis and along the depth gradient. Typically, a pelagic ...

To improve local economy, the red king crab (Paralithodes camtschaticus) was introduced to the Barents Sea by Soviet scientists in the 1960s. Adapting well to the new environment, the growing population gradually invaded new areas along the coast of northern Norway. The red king crab has become a valuable marine resource but as an introduced species, it is also a potential threat to the ecosystem. ...

Marine ecosystems are under pressures of human activities that have altered their dynamics and structure during the last five decades, but there can also vary due to internal dynamics or chance. Managers focus on human activities and often ignore the contribution of internal dynamics and chance to ecosystem dynamics in the decision-making process. In this thesis, I use food-web modelling based on ...

The list of achievements in developing pharmaceuticals and other useful products originating from Nature is long, and it continues to extend. Marine bioprospecting alone has generated three novel drugs in the last four years. The continued success motivates further bioprospecting efforts in the search for utilisable products from natural sources. In this thesis, extracts of Arctic marine organisms ...

Price and quantity numbers, which we are observing in a market place, occur because of an interaction between supply and demand. An understanding of what drives supply and demand is therefore important in order to understand the market in itself. This dissertation focuses on determining the impact of exogenous factors on salmon biomass growth and how producers respond to price changes. Furthermore, ...