Happy summer break! ☀️ After many busy weeks—with @nadiave.bsky.social presenting at Pint of Science in Trondheim and the NWOLife conference in the Netherlands, a field trip to collect more Tomopteris, AND the submission of a paper—we're enjoying some well-deserved time off. Have a great summer! 😃
Nadia Maria van Eekelen
@nadiave.bsky.social
PhD student in marineneurolab.bsky.social 🌊🧠 | MSc Marine Biology @unigroningen.bsky.social 🐟 (she/her)
🌟 NEW OCTRON RELEASE! 🌟 Want to track your animals using the command line? You can now train models and predict videos with single prompts in a terminal! Ideal for batch jobs, headless servers, and remote machines. Big shout-out to @roald-arboel.com for helping with this release!
It's #InternationalPolychaeteDay! We might be biased, but is there any polychaete more beautiful than #Tomopteris? Like this one that we named Tina, filmed under infrared lights 😍
Yay!!! Congratulations to you again @noralied.bsky.social 🥳 Thank you for being my very first MSc student to supervise. It was such a joy, and I'm super proud of what you achieved ☺️
Today @noralied.bsky.social became a Master of Science! 🥳🎓🔬 She has optimised immunohistochemistry protocols for detecting key proteins in our favourite worms. Big thanks to @helmlab.bsky.social and @gquattrocolo.bsky.social for examining the thesis!
Midwater worms >> terrestrial worms. 😍 #tomopteris 🦑🧪🌊 #DesigningtheFuture3 @mbarinews.bsky.social @schmidtocean.bsky.social
BIG UPDATES! OCTRON now supports the new SAM3 models (alongside SAM2)! We’ve also added a global switch for Detection vs. Segmentation: Use the same annotations to train either lightweight detection or full segmentation models. Plus, we’ve added support for the new YOLO26 models. ⤵️ 1/12
Happy international women in science day from all of us! 👩🔬 #WomenInSTEM #WomenInScience #InternationalDayOfWomenAndGirlsInScience From left to right: @noralied.bsky.social @nadiave.bsky.social @rijacobsen.bsky.social
You can use #OCTRON to track cells too! It took 10 min to annotate multiple cells in 146 frames, 1.5 hrs to train a model with a GPU, and 10 sec to make these predictions. It doesn't get much easier than that⚡️
A Christmas present from us and the rest of the #OCTRON team to you: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🎁
🌟 Our first paper! 🌟 @octoscience.bsky.social has created a complete pipeline that makes tracking weird and wonderful animals a breeze, and we've had a blast testing it on our wriggly worms. Check out this thread to see it in action 👇 #OCTRON
Do you love quantifying animal behavior as much as we do? We have just the tool for you! Presenting #OCTRON - a pipeline that helps you create rich annotation data and enables training of custom segmentation models. Have a look, particularly if you work with non-model / invertebrate organisms!
My first ever paper as a xmas present! 🎄 Check out this amazing pipeline created by @octoscience.bsky.social to track squishy animals 🐙 Very happy I could contribute to this, #OCTRON works great on my gossamer worms! 👇
Do you love quantifying animal behavior as much as we do? We have just the tool for you! Presenting #OCTRON - a pipeline that helps you create rich annotation data and enables training of custom segmentation models. Have a look, particularly if you work with non-model / invertebrate organisms!
We spent a week at Sletvik field station collecting worms! MSc student Amalie from the University of Copenhagen joined and stayed for 3 weeks to work in our lab 🌟 We caught ~60 Tomopteris with R/V Gunnerus during the day and were treated to great views of the northern lights at night
Celebrating the lab turning 5 years old at the restaurant Troll 🎉
We just published our third major funding application, including the evaluation it received, for the benefit of future applicants 🙌 Because #OpenScience is also about sharing ideas and examples that others can learn from 🌟 www.ogrants.org/grants/jacob...
Funding application (RCN, 2024): Deciphering bioluminescent communication in marine annelids · Open Grants
ogrants.org
And a small milestone for me: I'm supervising my first MSc student! It's great to have you in the lab, @noralied.bsky.social ☺️
Meet our first MSc student! This is @noralied.bsky.social 🌟 She is in her 5th year studying natural science with teacher education at #NTNU, and for her thesis she will optimize immunohistochemical methods for detecting neurons in marine annelid brains 🧠💪
Happy #InternationalPolychaeteDay! 🌍🪱 To celebrate, here’s a glimpse of the bioluminescence of our gossamer worms! This video was captured in the lab by @nadiave.bsky.social using a monochrome camera — so it's in black and white — but in real life, the worms glow in a stunning bright yellow.
Are you at the Gordon Research Conference on Neuroethology in Florence later this week? 👀 @nadiave.bsky.social will present a poster supported by a grant from the Tom Wilhelmsen’s Foundation (thank you for the support)! We celebrated the grant with Nadia’s favourite treat: lemon meringue pie 🍋
Here's the video again but hopefully less blurry! ☺️ I'd never seen so many Tomopteris in one place - absolutely wild
How to make a biologist happy: provide almost 100 specimens of their favourite marine worm (how many do you see in the video?) Big thank you to Snorre Bakke and his students at #NTNU #Ålesund. We had a busy weekend! 🤩
Forever sharing every Tomopteris video I come across. They're beautiful, and even though I study them, they still manage to surprise me every time.
In the deep sea, we know all about romance. ❤️ Female gossamer worms (Tomopteris spp.) produce a pheromone that attracts males and signals them to shed sperm into the water. This, in turn, signals the female to release her eggs—a behavior called swarming.
Had a great time presenting at the NTNU-wide symposium "NeuroSYS" last week. A 5-minute datablitz is short, but I hope I made a few people curious about bioluminescent worms! ✨️ @marineneurolab.bsky.social @kavlintnu.bsky.social #neuroscience #bioluminescence #research
Rejection tastes better with chocolate. And coffee. And a big layer of mascarpone 🍫 😉
In keeping with tradition, a big funding rejection (🥲) means it's treat time! More specifically, tiramisu-tower-time 🎉 It's not easy to start something new, but the like-minded people you meet along the way make it worth it. They keep science fun 🎈🌟
One thing we did last year was to build our lab and in this video made by @nadiave.bsky.social you can see how it all came together! Our worms naturally live in the deep ocean where sunlight never reaches, so we built a tent where we can house them and do behavioural experiments in total darkness 🌚
I just learned about Hamid Nedari Yeganeh, who makes amazing drawings using only mathematical equations. Now I can't begin to understand how he does this, but I wanted to share this one he made of a gossamer worm. So cool! 🤯
Run, don't walk, to see this AMAZING video about the bioluminescent ostracods! As said at the end, "I want people to know about them" A #Crustmas feature related to work of @ostratodd.bsky.social @nikohensley.bsky.social @emilylau.bsky.social @lisayetermesrop.bsky.social @emily-ellis.bsky.social 🧪🦑
Spectacular crustacean light shows reveal biodiversity on Caribbean reefs
YouTube video by Science Magazine
youtube.com
For #Crustmas I will give you so many ostracods, with calcified shells enclosing the body. These are myodocopes: "Giant" (3 cm) Gigantocypris with mirror eyes, bioluminescent sexual displays in the Luxorina, eyeless cave dwellers like Spelaeoecia, and SO many fossils (here with pyritized eggs) 🧪🦑
Meet the team at the MNL! We're a small lab with big ambitions, but also value time off. Because discoveries are made by humans, so you need to put their wellbeing first. Meet our humans below! 👇
The lab where I'm doing my PhD is on BlueSky now too! Follow along for updates about our glowing worms 🌟
We're a lab dedicated to marine neuroscience, focusing on a little worm that glows to communicate. What does it say with its flashes of light? And what role does its nervous system play? Stay tuned to find out! 🌟🌊🧠
Hi everyone! I'm Nadia and I'm a PhD student in marine neuroscience at the NTNU in Trondheim. My research is about the bioluminescent communication of marine annelids (specifically Tomopteris) 🪱🌊🧠