Doris Björling

About Doris Björling

The phylum Cnidaria houses several widely known taxa. You would struggle to find anyone who has never heard of corals and anemones (class Anthozoa) or true jellyfish (class Schyphozoa). This is not the case with class Hydrozoa. Despite hydrozoan species in Sweden being several times more numerous than Anthozoa and Schyphozoa together, you might struggle to find anyone who has heard of them. This, perhaps, reflect that very little research attention has been paid to Swedish hydrozoans during the last 120 years.

My PhD project, HYDROINS, funded by the Swedish Taxonomy Initiative (SLU), will bring attention to Hydrozoa through an inventory of Anthoathecata, one of two large orders in the class. During the project I will examine museum specimens and fresh material from type localities and from Swedish coastal habitats and lakes. I will evaluate the status of the current species list for Sweden using an integrative morphological and molecular approach and deposit a geo-tagged reference collection at the Natural History Museum in Gothenburg. The work will also include generating publicly available barcodes and describing species new to science.