Image: Barite chimney with fauna at Loki’s Castle hydrothermal vent field (2300 m). Credit: Centre for Deep Sea Research, University of Bergen. ROV Ægir6000 (NORMAR).
Because of their abundance of nutrients and challenging environmental conditions, chemosynthesis-based ecosystems (hydrothermal vents, cold seeps and organic falls; CBEs) have a high degree of specialised fauna only found in these habitats. The fauna of Arctic chemosynthesis-based ecosystems is still largely uncharacterized, with a very high proportion of species being new to science, and many taxon groups having a poorly developed taxonomy.
The NorCBE project, funded by the Norwegian Biodiversity Information Centre (Artsdatabanken) will improve our knowledge about the fauna of CBEs in the Norwegian deep sea by producing geographic species records and DNA-barcodes of fauna. The project will involve processing of samples from CBEs at various depths and environmental conditions (100-4000m), and include both specialized taxa and species from the background fauna which inhabits the periphery of the active CBEs.
The NorCBE project is led by MH Eilertsen at the Department of Biological Sciences (UiB) in collaboration with the Department of Natural History at the University Museum of Bergen (UiB-UM), the Arctic University of Norway (UiT) and Arctic University Museum of Norway in Tromsø (UiT-UM). In addition to the core team, the extended team includes collaborators with specific taxonomic competence in the focus taxa of the project.
cbearctic.com 