Erik Olsen
@erikolsen.bsky.social
590 followers 480 following 93 posts
Head of Research Group for Sustainable Development @ Institute of Marine Research, 🇳🇴 Interested in (too) many things: computer models | ecosystem-based management | seafood systems | politics | brewing | cooking | outdoors | photography | board games
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erikolsen.bsky.social
Norway's biggest newspaper VG picked up our turtle rescue story! 🤩 Great coverage of the EAF Nansen programme, marine sustainability challenges & R/V Dr. Fridtjof Nansen alongside the main rescue story. Thrilled with how it turned out! 🦑🧪

www.vg.no/nyheter/i/KM...
Redda havskjelpadder i fiskegarn: - Eit globalt problem
På oppdrag i Bengalbukta, redda forskarane to havskjelpadder.
www.vg.no
erikolsen.bsky.social
here is the other video
erikolsen.bsky.social
Two videos showing the release of one of the sea-turtles 🐢 we rescued from the ghost net we encountered yesterday in the Bay of Bengal . Very impressed by the skill and efficiency of the R/V Dr. Fridtjof Nansen Crew! 😊 🧪🦑
erikolsen.bsky.social
🐢 SEA TURTLE RESCUE! 🐢
450km from land in Bay of Bengal, we found 2 sea turtles trapped in a ghost net. Our crew quickly freed both turtles & retrieved the dangerous net. Two lives saved, one less threat in our oceans!
#SeaTurtles #GhostFishing #OceanRescue
erikolsen.bsky.social
🐍 Snake-news is apparently very popular
The IMR facebook post has been picked up by a Norwegian online news media. A bit sensational headline, "Horror-catch" 😂, but the article itself is true to what I sent to the journalist.

🦑

sol.no/nyheter/skre...
Skrekkfangst: - Kan dø av et bitt
- Vi ønsker ikke å ta livet av dyr med mindre vi må, sier Havforskningsinstituttet.
sol.no
erikolsen.bsky.social
Lots of fishing boats around us this morning in the Bay of Bengal. They're fishing for hilsa (Tenualosa ilisha), the national fish of Bangladesh, a high-price, fast-swimming schooling pelagic fish species. 🦑🧪
Image from: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-90864-6#Fig1
erikolsen.bsky.social
🌊 After the gale passe, Bangladesh's waters come alive! Off-shore shelf: modern trawlers meet traditional wooden boats. Nearshore: 30,000+ small artisanal vessels create livelihoods for coastal communities 🎣
#Bangladesh #Fishing 🦑
erikolsen.bsky.social
Venomous seasnakes are common here in the Bay of Bengal, and we have to be very careful sorting our trawl catches, handling any snakes we catch safely and with care. Our team is trained & we follow a strict protocal.

After being weighed and photographed the snakes are released back to sea 🧪🦑🐍
erikolsen.bsky.social
But it's not just fish who stop by in this underwater selfie-booth. Yesterday a yellow-bellied seasnake stopped to get its photo taken :-D 🧪🦑🐍
erikolsen.bsky.social
We're using a camera system mounted in the trawl to see what passes through the trawl at different depths (DeepVision). A great tool to see what is actually in the different layers we see on the echosounder. (see this paper by my colleagues for more details: academic.oup.com/icesjms/arti...)
erikolsen.bsky.social
So, Bird-bluesky: What species of bird is this?

It has been hanging around our research vessel all day in the middle of the Bay of Bengal.

nyckel.com thinks it is a 'Short Billed Dowitcher', but only with a 48% confidence. 🧪🦑🐦🦆
erikolsen.bsky.social
🇧🇩 MILESTONE MOMENT! Just crossed into Bangladesh EEZ in the Bay of Bengal and got a call from the Minister of Fisheries herself!
First time EVER a minister has personally reached out to learn about our research. Talk about validation for the science!
The team is absolutely buzzing right now 🙌

🦑🧪
erikolsen.bsky.social
After 3 days sailing from Colombo 🇱🇰 we arrived at our first station in international waters in the Bay of Bengal. We measured water chemistry, temperature, salinity ++ to 2750m depth. The trawl sampled fish and plankton in the upper 150m, and surprisingly caught a lot of swimming crabs.

🧪🦑
erikolsen.bsky.social
A potential game-changer for feeding bees 🐝: A new nutritionally tailored food supplement which is cost-effective and can provide a sustainable solution to help tackle the devastating decline in honeybees.
🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Engineered yeast provides rare but essential pollen sterols for honeybees - Nature
Genetic engineering of a yeast strain provides rare but essential pollen sterols for honeybee colonies.
www.nature.com
erikolsen.bsky.social
A 2018 study from Sri Lanka found the mean pod size to be 2.64, with the highest density and largest groups in the submarine canyon off the coastline of Mirissa and busy shipping lanes between Dondra Head and Galle, the same area where we observed the pod yesterday.
www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/10...
www.mdpi.com
erikolsen.bsky.social
Blue whales 🐋 ahead!!

Passed a pod of three blue whales south of Sri Lanka (~20km offshore). These ocean giants aggregate in this area, so we hope for more sightings😅

🦑🧪
erikolsen.bsky.social
Off to adventures in the Bay of Bengal😀 Starting a 32-day #EAFNansen fisheries & ecosystem survey in Bangladesh tomorrow. Colombo 🇱🇰 is our start and end port, & today we were visited by the 🇱🇰 minister of fisheries who got a tour of the vessel

🧪🦑
erikolsen.bsky.social
What an Ocean-day in Nice!😀
Very successful India - Norway event on the tall ship Statsraad Lehmkuhl today co-hosted by the Indian minister for Earth Sciences and the Norwegian Minister for Development & with HRH Crown-Prince Haakon as guest of honour.🤩
🦑