BLEED is a team of scientists who strives to develop bryozoans as a model system for understanding evolution. Our core team is based at the University of Oslo, Norway.
Bryozoans are beautiful creatures that have inhabited earth for more than 480 million years. They are colonial, largely marine, and usually rather small, hence out of the usual media limelight enjoyed by mammals, dinosaurs and royal families around the world.
- From Ernst Haeckel”s Kunstformen der Natur
Why study ecology and evolution using bryozoans? Because they have an amazing fossil record that allows us to track biotic interactions, fecundity, population density & phenotypic traits through time. They are also common components of marine habitats and have been for millions of years. Our “holy grail” is to develop bryozoans as “the Drosophila of macroevolution” in order to link microevolutionary and ecological processes with macroevolutionary patterns and processes.
We are currently funded by two Research Council of Norway Grants (LINK, PI Liow DETERMINE, PI Voje). From Jan 2018, BLEED will also be funded by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (macroevolution.abc, PI Liow).
Find us at the Natural History Museum of Oslo (Tøyen campus) and the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis at the Department of Biosciences (Blindern campus) of the University of Oslo, Norway.
