Björn Källström

University of Gothenburg | GU · Department of Marine Sciences

The clinging jellyfish Gonionemus sp. is a small hydromedusa species known historically from the Swedish west coast but not reported in recent times. This species is thought to be native to the northwest Pacific where it is notorious for causing severe stings in humans and is considered invasive or cryptogenic elsewhere. This year, unlike in the pa...

There have been very few studies of temporal processes at chemosynthetic ecosystems, even at relatively more accessible shallow water sites. Here we report the development and deployment of a simple cabled video observatory at 30 m water depth in Gullmarsfjorden, Sweden. The camera provides a live video feed to the internet of faunal activity in th...

Using observations, experiments and model simulations we investigate the possibility and range of long-distance dispersal by seed rafting in eelgrass, Zostera marina, at the Swedish west coast. A field experiment showed that the breaking strength of post-flowering rhipidia decreased significantly over a 30-day period, indicating that ontogenetic ch...

It has been proposed that biodiversity can be important for ecosystem functioning and act as an insurance against perturbations and environmental fluctuations. To date, theoretical work supports this idea but direct experimental evidence is still to some extent ambiguous and debated. The main reason for this debate – and the lack of strong empirica...

The study of hydrothermal vent and seep fauna is associated with great costs due to the deep and distant locations. Whale-falls, which are thought to have habitat conditions which overlap seep ecosystems, may be used as a model system to explore questions such as the evolution of dispersal strategies and interactions between hosts and their symbion...

We describe a new species of the remarkable whalebone-eating siboglinid worm genus, Osedax, from a whale carcass in the shallow north Atlantic, west of Sweden. Previously only recorded from deep-sea (1500-3000 m) whale-falls in the northeast Pacific, this is the first species of Osedax known from a shelf-depth whale-fall, and the first from the Atl...