As part of our ongoing collaboration on the PUFFINS project (which has nothing to do with puffins) with colleagues in South Africa, Lars Martin recently spent 2 weeks combining lab visits, fieldwork, and the funding programme's conference. Here’s a short update from the trip. My first day was dedicated to a visit to the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity (SAIAB). I was given a full tour of the facilities, including their laboratories and library, offering a grea

At the beginning of May, Knut, Robert, and Lotte excitedly attended Sharks International 2026, which is only hosted every fourth year. Sharks International was hosted for its fifth time - this time in Colombo, the capital of beautiful Sri Lanka. The conference brought together students, researchers, conservationists, and policy experts from across the world to share knowledge on sharks, rays, and chimaeras. As the largest conference dedicated to shark, ray, and chimaera scien

PI of the project Knut tagging a cod Late January brought calm, cold, and dry winter days that gave us excellent opportunities to tag cod for the CARE‑COD project. The project aims to identify behavior and life-history of different Atlantic cod ecotypes and to investigate whether some ecotypes are more prone to rapid human‑induced changes. In previous CARE‑COD work, our catch efforts have focused further inside the fjords and therefore targeted coastal ecotypes. To improve ou

Our new paper on downstream migration of European eel ( Anguilla anguilla ) is out, and the main finding is surprisingly simple: a small tweak to a hydropower intake can make a big difference for eel survival. At Fosstveit Hydropower Plant in southern Norway, survival of silver eels jumped from roughly 50–70% to 100% after the intake was retrofitted. For a critically endangered species, that’s huge. European eels grow up in our rivers and lakes before heading all the way to t