We spent a lovely week in October collecting animals at the field station of NTNU in Agdenes in central Norway.

About 15 researchers and collection curators were gathered for a week of sampling with gear ranging from grabs and trawls deployed from the research vessel Gunnerus to buckets and shovels on the beach. As you may be able to tell, a good time was had by all!

The field work was arranged by the our colleagues at NTNU University Museum, and served multiple purposes:

• We collected ultra-fresh material for barcoding through the norwegian Barcode of Live project (NorBOL) – several plates were initiated during the week and then brought back to Bergen where we will continue filling them with material from our collections – each plate needs to be filled with 95 samples that can be run with the same primer, so we need to select our material carefully.
• The marine collections of NTNU got a substantial boost
• Fresh material was collected for teaching faunistics
• Photodocumenting live specimens (we have some fantastic polychaete photos from this coming up later in our calendar)
• Four Norwegian Species Initiative funded projects were participating, collecting material for their projects – as were people from the EU-project SponGES.
• We at UM also relished the chance to sample in the littoral zone, which is a undersampled habitat in our collections

We are working on the material now, and some of it is scheduled to make an apperance on the blog over the next couple of weeks – so stay tuned!