Research Projects

The international IceAGE Programme (Icelandic marine Animals: Genetics and Ecology) studies marine areas in the northern Atlantic. This region is particularly sensitive to climate change. The area has a wide temperature range (from -0.9°C to 14°C). Underwater mountain ranges covered with cold-water corals run from below 3000 m to 300 m water depth ... [ more ]

Insects are land-dwelling crustaceans. This finding has turned our understanding of the evolution of crustaceans upside down. But despite intensive research, the relationships between and even within the large crustacean taxa have not yet been convincingly elucidated ... [ more ]

Australia harbours the world's greatest diversity of "large crayfish". As many of the species are difficult to distinguish morphologically, this diversity was not recognised for a long time and thus the diversity of these crustaceans was greatly underestimated ...
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Branchiopod crustaceans reproduce with the help of special drought-resistant permanent eggs. These permanent eggs can survive for years and even decades in the sediment of dried-up temporary water bodies. When the waters fill up with water again, the permanent eggs hatch and thus form a new generation and local population ... [ more ]

The deep sea appears to us as a uniform, coherent habitat. But is this habitat also so uniform for the organisms living there? To what extent do mountains, deep-sea trenches or other structures represent obstacles?
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The aim of the biodiversity project is to characterise benthic communities in the area north of the Rodriguez-Triple Junction (south central Indian Ridge) and along the southeast Indian Ridge. Species composition, distribution patterns and dependence on environmental variables will be investigated ... [ more ]