Austevoll Marine Station
Norwegian sand lance are hatching!
Emma arrives in Norway to start sand lance experiment
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1 March 2026. Hannes just returned from a weeklong trip to Norway, where he spread the word about our lab's sand lance research to colleagues and the Water Research Institute (NIVA) in Oslo and the Marine Research Institute (IMR) in Austevoll near Bergen.
Austevoll, the world-famous marine research station, has also been PhD student Emma Siegfried's home for the past 2 1/2 months. Emma became the first US recipient of a European Union exchange fellowship (AQUASERV program) that covered the costs of her stay and her research in Norway. The goal of her project is to rear embryos of a local sand lance species, the Lesser sandeel Ammodytes marinus, under different levels of CO2 to then compare the results to what is already known for the Northern sand lance A. dubius on the western side of the Atlantic ocean.
Emma's experiment has been a success so far, thanks in no small part to the incredible help of our Norwegian collaborators. Every one at the station has been welcoming, friendly and eager to show us the large-scale aquaculture research on cod, halibut, haddock, plaice and many other fish species that is being conducted here every day of the year.
As we gape at the impressive tanks and installations, as we chat eagerly about deepening our collaborative ties and enjoy Norwegian hospitality and nature, we feel that this may indeed be the beginning of another great chapter of sand lance science to come.
Emma returns to the US on 12. March 2026, eager to work up the collected data and tell her peers about the experience.
By Emma Siegfried.
Austevoll, 10 February 2026. More than two months into my research stay here in Norway, things are going pretty well. Instead of one single experiment, we actually ended up running 3 separate experiments at once because the female fish took their sweet time to get ready to spawn.
As I learned, it is quite common in the tanks here that only a few females become ready to spawn at a time, which meant that a new trial had to be started again and again.
Our first spawn was now exactly 4 weeks ago, and I'm happy to report that our first embryos in the 10˚C treatment started hatching last week! Now we’re counting the larvae that are hatching each day, taking photos of them on the day of hatch and then also taking videos of their hearts to measure heart rate.
The hatchlings are then preserved, mostly in ethanol but also in RNAlater for potential further genomic and transcriptomic analyses.
I have now only a month left here in Norway, and I’m excited that the experiment is going well. At the same time, I’m ready for it to be over so that I can start analyzing data and seeing what results we have found!
By Emma Siegfried
16 December 2025. Hi, Emma here reporting in from the Institute of Marine Research in Storebø, Norway! After a quick stop in Amsterdam, I landed in Bergen on Saturday morning. I grabbed a quick ferry to get over to the island and settled in over the weekend in one of the on-station residences. The area is pretty rural, but the surroundings are idyllic. The islands are exactly what you would expect to see out of a movie.
Yesterday, I was able to get a tour of the station, and the facilities here are incredible. If I had to estimate it’s probably 6 or 7 times the size of Rankin lab. The facility has been doing research on the early life history stages of Cod, Haddock and Plaice on top of previous work with Lesser Sand Lance (Ammodytes marinus) larvae, and as a result has some quite large broodstock tanks.
Unfortunately, I was not able to make it to the station in time to go fishing for the adults that we will use for my experiment because boat time is very dependent on the weather. At this point, the fish have buried themselves in the sand and will be there until they are ready to spawn in a few weeks. In the meantime, we’ve started working on setting up the rearing system for the embryos so that it is ready in time for spawning.
Hopefully things will continue to go smoothly!