Erik Olsen

Why you should still treat AI with some caution...

Prompt to ChatGPT: "make an image with 100 animals on a white background with their names underneath each animal"

Result: 🫣🤪😵‍💫

Research scientists in research and advice for fisheries stock assessment in a development context  (294225) | Institute of Marine Research Job title: Research scientists in research and advice for fisheries stock assessment in a development context  (294225), Employer: Institute of Marine Research, Deadline: Sunday, March 1, 2026

Are you a fisheries assessment scientist looking for new opportunities? Come join our team at the Institute of Marine Research in Bergen, Norway, working on exciting developments projects in the global south. 🦑🧪🐟

www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Probabilistic Computing Optimization of Complex Spin-Glass Topologies Spin glass systems as lattices of disordered magnets with random interactions have important implications within the theory of magnetization and applications to a wide-range of hard combinatorial opti...

Not my field, but just had to share … new paper on probabilistic computing by out on Arxiv
arxiv.org/abs/2510.23419

(Proud dad)

Redda havskjelpadder i fiskegarn: - Eit globalt problem På oppdrag i Bengalbukta, redda forskarane to havskjelpadder.

Norway's biggest newspaper VG picked up our turtle rescue story! 🤩 Great coverage of the EAF Nansen programme, marine sustainability challenges & R/V Dr. Fridtjof Nansen alongside the main rescue story. Thrilled with how it turned out! 🦑🧪

www.vg.no/nyheter/i/KM...

here is the other video

Two videos showing the release of one of the sea-turtles 🐢 we rescued from the ghost net we encountered yesterday in the Bay of Bengal . Very impressed by the skill and efficiency of the R/V Dr. Fridtjof Nansen Crew! 😊 🧪🦑

🐢 SEA TURTLE RESCUE! 🐢
450km from land in Bay of Bengal, we found 2 sea turtles trapped in a ghost net. Our crew quickly freed both turtles & retrieved the dangerous net. Two lives saved, one less threat in our oceans!
#SeaTurtles #GhostFishing #OceanRescue

Small fish, big implications: considerations for an ecosystem approach to capelin fisheries management - Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries Climate-driven changes in the Subarctic will directly impact capelin populations and the ecosystem they inhabit, including their predators, prey, and physical habitats. Consequently, incorporating eco...

📣 New paper out! Ecosystem approach to capelin fisheries #marsocsci
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Skrekkfangst: - Kan dø av et bitt - Vi ønsker ikke å ta livet av dyr med mindre vi må, sier Havforskningsinstituttet.

🐍 Snake-news is apparently very popular
The IMR facebook post has been picked up by a Norwegian online news media. A bit sensational headline, "Horror-catch" 😂, but the article itself is true to what I sent to the journalist.

🦑

sol.no/nyheter/skre...

Norway’s Labour party wins election after seeing off populist surge Success for party of the prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, despite increased support for rightwing Progress party

Relieved that the Labour party continues to lead the 🇳🇴 government for the next four years.
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

Image from: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-90864-6#Fig1

Lots of fishing boats around us this morning in the Bay of Bengal. They're fishing for hilsa (Tenualosa ilisha), the national fish of Bangladesh, a high-price, fast-swimming schooling pelagic fish species. 🦑🧪

🌊 After the gale passe, Bangladesh's waters come alive! Off-shore shelf: modern trawlers meet traditional wooden boats. Nearshore: 30,000+ small artisanal vessels create livelihoods for coastal communities 🎣
#Bangladesh #Fishing 🦑

Venomous seasnakes are common here in the Bay of Bengal, and we have to be very careful sorting our trawl catches, handling any snakes we catch safely and with care. Our team is trained & we follow a strict protocal.

After being weighed and photographed the snakes are released back to sea 🧪🦑🐍

But it's not just fish who stop by in this underwater selfie-booth. Yesterday a yellow-bellied seasnake stopped to get its photo taken :-D 🧪🦑🐍

We're using a camera system mounted in the trawl to see what passes through the trawl at different depths (DeepVision). A great tool to see what is actually in the different layers we see on the echosounder. (see this paper by my colleagues for more details: academic.oup.com/icesjms/arti...)

So, Bird-bluesky: What species of bird is this?

It has been hanging around our research vessel all day in the middle of the Bay of Bengal.

nyckel.com thinks it is a 'Short Billed Dowitcher', but only with a 48% confidence. 🧪🦑🐦🦆

🇧🇩 MILESTONE MOMENT! Just crossed into Bangladesh EEZ in the Bay of Bengal and got a call from the Minister of Fisheries herself!
First time EVER a minister has personally reached out to learn about our research. Talk about validation for the science!
The team is absolutely buzzing right now 🙌

🦑🧪

After 3 days sailing from Colombo 🇱🇰 we arrived at our first station in international waters in the Bay of Bengal. We measured water chemistry, temperature, salinity ++ to 2750m depth. The trawl sampled fish and plankton in the upper 150m, and surprisingly caught a lot of swimming crabs.

🧪🦑

Scientists found the missing nutrients bees need — Colonies grew 15-fold Scientists have developed a breakthrough food supplement that could help save honeybees from devastating declines. By engineering yeast to produce six essential sterols found in pollen, researchers pr...

See also the story on @sciencedaily.com.web.brid.gy : www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...

Engineered yeast provides rare but essential pollen sterols for honeybees - Nature Genetic engineering of a yeast strain provides rare but essential pollen sterols for honeybee colonies.

A potential game-changer for feeding bees 🐝: A new nutritionally tailored food supplement which is cost-effective and can provide a sustainable solution to help tackle the devastating decline in honeybees.
🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A 2018 study from Sri Lanka found the mean pod size to be 2.64, with the highest density and largest groups in the submarine canyon off the coastline of Mirissa and busy shipping lanes between Dondra Head and Galle, the same area where we observed the pod yesterday.
www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/10...

Blue whales 🐋 ahead!!

Passed a pod of three blue whales south of Sri Lanka (~20km offshore). These ocean giants aggregate in this area, so we hope for more sightings😅

🦑🧪

Off to adventures in the Bay of Bengal😀 Starting a 32-day #EAFNansen fisheries & ecosystem survey in Bangladesh tomorrow. Colombo 🇱🇰 is our start and end port, & today we were visited by the 🇱🇰 minister of fisheries who got a tour of the vessel

🧪🦑

East Asian aerosol cleanup has likely contributed to the recent acceleration in global warming - Communications Earth & Environment Restrictions of atmospheric aerosol and precursor emissions in East Asia have contributed to the observed global surface warming acceleration since 2010, according to Earth System Model simulations is...

New article published today by my colleague @bjornsamset.bsky.social in Nature Comms: Earth and Environment. Evidence from eight Earth System Models that the reduction in East Asia's (primarily China's) air pollution is consistent with the sharper growth in warming.

Havets framtid på den røde løper i Nice Som i filmfestivalen vanker det både ris og ros når den store havkonferansen går av stabelen på Frankrikes sørlige kyst. Godt da at Norge stiller med et sterkt lag.

Sustainable ocean planning & management is key if we are to solve ocean sustainability challenges & the triple-planetary crisis.

www.khrono.no/havets-framt...

🦑🐟

What an Ocean-day in Nice!😀
Very successful India - Norway event on the tall ship Statsraad Lehmkuhl today co-hosted by the Indian minister for Earth Sciences and the Norwegian Minister for Development & with HRH Crown-Prince Haakon as guest of honour.🤩
🦑

Ny studie: Havets kjemper i fare Selv ikke et fullt vern av 30 prosent av verdens havområder vil være nok til å beskytte de største dyrene i havet, viser en ny internasjonal studie.

Local newspaper @bergenstidende.bsky.social published an article on the #MEGAMOVE paper on area-use by marine mega-fauna www.bt.no/innenriks/i/... 🤩
@anammsequeira.bsky.social 🦑

UN-Backed Study Highlights How Tracking Ocean Giants Advances Marine Conservation A groundbreaking global initiative, known as MegaMove, has brought together nearly 400 scientists from over 50 countries in an unprecedented effort to map the space use of more than 110 species of marine megafauna. This collective endeavor, harnessing decades of sophisticated animal tracking data, represents the most extensive attempt to date to identify critical habitats and migratory corridors that these iconic ocean giants depend upon.

UN-Backed Study Highlights How Tracking Ocean Giants Advances Marine Conservation

A groundbreaking global initiative, known as MegaMove, has brought together nearly 400 scientists from over 50 countries in an unprecedented effort to map the space use of more than 110 species of marine megafauna.…

MegaMove uncovers where protection is needed for marine megafauna A new Science paper maps global hotspots for marine megafauna & finds that planned increased protection will be insufficient to cover most areas

📢A MegaMove milestone has just been published in @ScienceMagazine!
With ~380 collaborators from 50 countries, we mapped the movements of 12k+ marine megafauna to identify key habitats 🌊🐋🦈
@pewenvironment.bsky.social @uwaoceans.bsky.social
www.sequeiralab.com/news/megamov...

Global tracking of marine megafauna space use reveals how to achieve conservation targets The recent Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) sets ambitious goals but no clear pathway for how zero loss of important biodiversity areas and halting human-induced extinction of thre...

New mega-paper on mega-fauna movement and area use out in Science: 6.8million locations, 111 species spanning all oceans. Great job by @anammsequeira.bsky.social & team. Honored to be among the >400 authors she pulled together: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...