Longitudinal data on individual growth and seasonal changes in body mass, girth, and blubber thickness are rarely available for cetaceans, making it difficult to assess their population composition and individual nutritional condition. During different time intervals from 1997 to 2020, we collected longitudinal data on length, body mass, girth,and blubber thickness from seventeen harbour porpoises ...

Reindeer herding and husbandry is a traditional and important livelihood in Fennoscandia, and about 200,000 semi-domesticated reindeer are herded in Finland. Climatic changes, leading to ice-locked winter pastures, and encroachment of pasture-land have led to changes in reindeer husbandry, increasing the extent of supplementary or full ration feeding, which has become very common in Finland. Keeping ...

Fish early life stages are well known for their sensitivity to crude oil exposure. However, the effect of crude oil exposure on adults and their gametes during their spawning period is not well studied. Polar cod, a key arctic fish, may be at risk for crude oil exposure during this potentially sensitive life stage. Additionally, this species experiences lower food availability during their spawning ...

Only 17 endemic land snail species are known so far on the Lesser Antillean island of Martinique, most of which are macrogastropods that are easily visible, and thus, easily collectable. On the other hand, species of microgastropods remain undersampled and overlooked. Based on recently collected shells from Mount Vauclin, we describe a new species of Scolodontidae, Miradiscops madinina sp. nov. from ...

Cod aquaculture is a rapidly expanding industry in Norway and with an increase of biomass in mariculture the concern for diseases spread to and from farmed populations of cod is increasing. The genus Gyrodactylus Nordmann, 1832 are parasitic monogeneans infecting teleost fish in marine and fresh water habitats worldwide. To investigate a possible problematic species of this genus the gill filaments ...

Norwegian fishers report an increase in negative interactions with marine mammals: An issue that is also on the rise, globally. Efforts to mitigate these interactions using currently available methods have yielded little success for larger cetaceans. This study examines the efficacy of a novel target-specific acoustic startle technology (TAST) in deterring killer whales (Orcinus orca) and humpback ...

The Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar L.) is a commercially important species that exhibits an anadromous life cycle involving migratory movements between freshwater and marine environments. Understanding the fundamental biology of the Atlantic salmon, particularly during key life history transitions such as smoltification, is therefore of great importance. In light of modern biotechnology and the completed ...

Seasonal coat colour moulting species moult to white winter fur for crypsis in snow-covered landscapes. Seasonal coat colour moulting occurs in birds and mammals; some are colour polymorphic; one of which is the arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus), having a blue and white colour morph. Camouflage, thermoregulation and physiology likely contributed to the evolution of this polymorphism. Climate change is ...

Secondary production was estimated at the Polar Front in 2022 using optical sampling techniques to sample zooplankton, growth rates computed with semi-emprical equations and egg production of Calanus spp. was also estimated.

Climate warming induces poleward distributional shifts of boreal species in Arctic regions resulting in compositional changes with poorly understood consequences for Arctic food-webs. This thesis addresses the spatial variation in Barents Sea food-webs using previously compiled distributional data in polygons specified for the Nowegian and Barents Sea NoBa Atlantis model and a highly resolved Barents ...