Marine Zoology

Our research

The Marine Zoology team focuses on the diversity, ecology and the role in the food web of various marine metazoans as well as their resilience to climate change and other anthropogenic stressors. Our main target taxa are zooplankton, including crustaceans (copepods, krill, amphipods) and soft-bodied zooplankton such as jellyfish and pteropod molluscs.

Our team has a strong focus on polar regions but has worked in many different regions in the world’s oceans, including various regions of the Atlantic Ocean and upwelling systems worldwide.

We work at the molecular and ecophysiological level and the ecological and energetic aspects of marine communities and food webs are in our center of interest. We apply different techniques: biomarker analyses, OMICs techniques (environmental DNA metabarcoding, transcriptomics), and ocean optics (analyses of underwater image and video footage).

Scientific work is carried out on board of various research vessels, at research stations and our home laboratories in Bremen. Intense collaboration is ongoing with the other marine working groups at the university, especially with the department of Marine Botany. There is also a close cooperation with the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT), GEOMAR in Kiel, the Thünen Institute of Sea Fisheries and Fisheries Ecology in Bremerhaven, and other universities and institutes in Germany (Hamburg, Duisburg-Essen, Kiel, …) and abroad (Arctic University of Norway, University of Bergen, …).

Courses

We are engaged in teaching in the Bachelor Biology, Bachelor of Natural Sciences for Sustainability and Master Marine Biology.
For details, see the module descriptions in Bachelor Biology and Master Marine Biology and lecture course schedule.