King penguins in the Bay of Crozet, which has an enormous colony.

Team Themisto

Research vessel Marion Dufresne.

Preparing the trawl.

Getting the trawl out of the water.

An amazing six week field campaign to the Southern Indian Ocean and the Terres australes et antarctiques françaises as part of the OBS Austral MD249 and the Themisto team has come to an end. Fantastic sampling of krill for climate adaptation research and great new friends and colleagues!

We have 🐟 herring pre print!

Our new study reveals that ancient gene flow between Pacific and Atlantic herring played a key role in helping Atlantic herring adapt to the brackish waters of the Baltic Sea.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Field work friends: recommend a dissection microscope that is suitable for field work focused on determining small invertebrate species! Needs good optics, portability and sturdiness. I have used Wild Heerbrugg M5A and M8 before, which are great but long in the tooth. Any modern alternatives?

@cemeb.bsky.social Our wonderful night and #CeMEB2025 conference dinner at venerable Gästrike-Hälsinge nation was perfected by an amazing performance Sånggripen, the ÖG nation choir.

And we're off! The #CLUPEA project, with researchers from Uppsala and Stockholm universities, has started! We will do advanced genetic research to understand the molecular mechanisms that enabled the herring to adapt to the Baltic Sea and that may be key for their resilience to climate change.

Such an exciting diversity and quality of presentations related to the evolution of vision and opsins at #ESEB2025! I regret we did not organize an associated symposium on these topics. To make up for it, please pop by my poster today (035) and we can have a mini symposium right here!

Tomorrow, on campuses across Europe, perplexed researchers will wonder, where did our evolutionary biologist colleagues go? Well it seems to me that we all went to #ESEB2025!

I am announcing an open PhD position involving bioinformatics, genomics and machine learning to work on functional prediction of adaptive genetic variation in krill and herring!

www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

Going to #ESEB2025 @eseb.bsky.social ?

Find me in poster session 1 for a chat!

Population Genomics in Practice The “Population Genomics in Practice” course is open for PhD students, postdocs, researchers, and other employees in Swedish universities, who need hands-on and practical skills to analyze population ...

The NBIS course "Population Genomics in Practice", held 15-19 September in Uppsala, is now open for applications! Join us to learn more about how to handle and analyze population genomic data. Deadline to apply: May 15! www.scilifelab.se/event/popula...

Piscivorous herring – a unique fish in the Baltic Sea ecosystem | slu.se In the coastal areas of the Baltic Sea, unusually large herring are sometimes caught, which has long raised questions. Are these large herring a separate population, or are they individuals that ha...

Press release: www.slu.se/en/ew-news/2...

@naturecomms.bsky.social @uppsalauniversitet.bsky.social

Let us know your thoughts or questions—we’d love to discuss! 9/n

Huge thanks to our team at Uppsala University, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and collaborators—and special shoutout to the local fishermen who inspired this research! 🐟🎣 8/n

Evolution of fast-growing piscivorous herring in the young Baltic Sea Nature Communications - The Atlantic herring is one of the world’s most abundant vertebrates and a typical plankton feeder of major ecological importance. This study shows that a piscivorous...

Dive into the full story by Jake Goodall, Leif Andersson and co-authors here: rdcu.be/d4y2b 7/n

The piscivorous herring feeds primarily on stickleback, which eat perch and pike larvae and is upsetting the Baltic food-web. Designing policies to avoid overfishing piscivorous herring could be key to control the stickleback and help restore the balance of the Baltic Sea ecosystem. 6/n

Why does this matter? In the sensitive Baltic Sea, the food-web is woven by few species and those that go extinct can not easily be replaced. Specialized ecotypes within species, like the piscivorous herring, are therefore extra important to maintain ecosystem stability. 5/n

Why did this evolve in the Baltic but not in the Atlantic? Lack of competitors like tuna or mackerel may have driven this adaptation, underscoring how species can adapt and differentiate rapidly when new ecological opportunities arise. 4/n

Our multidisciplinary analyses and results suggest there are several genetically distinct subpopulations of piscivorous herring north & south of Stockholm, and around the Baltic Sea. 3/n

We reveal the recent evolution of a genetically distinct, large piscivorous form of Atlantic herring in the Baltic Sea—an otherwise plankton-feeding species adapted to this young, brackish ecosystem. 🌊🧬 2/n

How does a plankton-eating fish evolve into a fast-growing, fish-eating predator? 🐟🤔 We are excited to share our new study in Nature Communications and answer this question! 1/n

Optimist: The cup is half full.
Pessimist: The cup is half empty.
Genomicist: N50 is when all drops needed to fill half of the cup have been added, sorted by length.