Some of our members were lucky enough to present their work on the SMM2024 in Perth, Australia! Below an impression of post-doc David, presenting the recent paper that’s in press about Northern elephant seals, Ramona presenting her recent work on polar ocean soundscapes and ecoacoustics, and Ane Liv presenting her poster on trait decomposition in Antarctic fur seals!

Five lab members attended the conservation genomics conference in Paris 2024. We had a great time, saw some very interesting talks and posters, and came home with many new ideas.

We had a very productive and inspirational lab retreat. On the first day, everybody presented current and past work, we had a “walk&talk” to catch up with each other and explore the area, and we ended with a fantastic workshop exploring some topics of interest and future directions (and ended with drinks!). The second day we started with a workshop about strengths and weaknesses, discussed lab organization and ended with the opportunity to sit together one-on-one for mentoring/scientific exchange. And of course there was time for a group picture! Thank you all that helped organizing this retreat!

A massive congratulations to Juan Masello, who has been appointed to an adjunct professorship at the Department of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, Engineering and Agriculture, University of Venda, South Africa. For more information, see: https://www.univen.ac.za/news/a-prolific-scientist-professor-masello-delivers-a-fascinating-inaugural-lecture/.

We are happy to announce that Bernice Sepers has won a prestigious Humboldt Research Fellowship to investigate the relationship between inbreeding and DNA methylation in Antarctic fur seals! We are really happy for Bernice and are grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for funding this project.

Congratulations to Kees Wanders, who just won a postdoctoral fellowship from the Bielefeld Young Researcher’s Fund to write his own postdoc. Kees will be joining us to work on the population genomics of shorebirds.

Our lab was well represented at the Behaviour2023 congress, with 5 poster presentations.

A massive congratulations to Kosmas Hench, who just secured his own postdoctoral fellowship to join the lab to work on the population genomics of Antarctic fur seals! We are grateful to the DFG-Schwerpunktprogramm Antarktisforschung for funding his project.

We are pleased to announce the publication of the Special Issue on Polar Genomics (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/genes/special_issues/Polar_Genomics) guest edited by Joe, Melody and Svenja.  The Special Issue contains 15 empirical papers plus a short editorial.  We are grateful to the Special Priority Programme Antarktisforschung for their support, as well as to all of those who contributed articles.

Ramona has been accepted for an international advanced PhD course (summer school) on the ‘Ecologically relevant oceanographic processes in the Northeastern Atlantic’ offered by the University of the Faroe Islands. This course, which will take place in late August in Tórshaven, Faroe Islands, promises an exciting journey and opportunity to learn about the oceanography of the Northeastern Atlantic