Gelatinous zooplankton AKA jellies are an ecologically important and diverse component of marine pelagic communities, with more than a hundred species in Norwegian waters alone. Yet, jellies are often poorly represented in traditional, net based zooplankton surveys due to methodological constraints related to sampling, processing, fixating, enumerating and identifying fragile, less abundant predators with an extreme size range. State-of-the-art molecular methods for assessing biodiversity, such as metabarcoding approaches including environmental DNA (eDNA), have been suggested as a solution to the problem, and are being rapidly adopted for monitoring purposes. But how well do the current metabarcoding methods really address gelatinous zooplankton diversity, and are there systematic biases in the results, as preliminary data suggest? As we head into the era of molecular diversity assessment, is history about to repeat itself in terms of poor representation of jellies in metabarcoding studies? Help us find out!

In the course of this project, you will learn about jelly diversity, DNA barcoding, metabarcoding, and bioinformatics. We expect the thesis to produce publishable results, with (co-)authorship for the student. While the thesis itself can be largely based on existing data, you will have the opportunity to join fieldwork and/or research cruise(s) as part of the Manet Team and the JellySafe project.

The thesis will be supervised by Aino Hosia, with Sanna Majaneva (Akvaplan-NIVA) as co-supervisor, and you will become an integrated member of the active Manet Team at the University Museum.