Monitoring of freshwater bodies

The project of exploring the Sea of Galilee in the late 60s of the 20th century, before the operation of the national carrier, included valuable items in the collection. From those years, collections of material from fresh water sources and springs that no longer exist today were also added to it. Deserving of special mention are the collections from the Hula deposit, which were collected by many researchers even before the partial drying of the lake and its pollution again in the 1950s, as well as samples from a survey of the undisturbed springs of the Dead Sea and Jordan Valley in the 1970s. 20, which resulted in the creation of the scientific basis for the study of the fauna in springs in Israel. The last major marine collection project, under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences, ended in 1985. The largest and most recent collection project, which dealt mainly with the Hula Valley, which was partially restored after drying, was largely managed by Dr. Hanan Dimentman and ended in 2006. Dr. Dimentman still continues to sort and identify invertebrates from freshwater bodies and winter pools.

Photo: Igor Armiach

Photo: Igor Armiach

Ringworms

A skilled field team relying on painstaking sampling transferred a lot of material to a sorting center for handling by four technicians. From 1971, Dr. Nachama Ben-Eliyahu began to occasionally collect samples of hard porous material (for the hidden fauna hidden in them), and especially samples from the cushion reef of Dendropoma corals. Some groups of worms were removed from the samples for sorting and identification, but most of the groups are still found in the mother samples and accessible to research today. Over the years, Dr. Ben-Eliyahu has focused on identifying and mapping the distribution of the tube worms (Serpulidae) in the eastern Mediterranean to Cyprus and the Gulf of Eilat, including the description of several species new to science. The knowledge gained in her research confirms the identification of the location and depth where they were Hard objects based on the accumulation of tubeworm tubes on their surface.

DCPE - Data Collection Project, Eilat

One of the highlights of Prof. Heinz Steinitz's marine biology laboratory in Eilat was the Eilat Data Collection Project (DCPE - Data Collection Project, Eilat) led by the third director of the laboratory, Prof. Ze'ev Reiss. The DCPE project marked the birth of modern oceanographic knowledge about the Gulf of Eilat and provided continuous data of physical, chemical and biological parameters, collected from several permanent stations along the Gulf in 1974-1977. The plankton collections and the hydro-chemical data from the DCPE project (Eilat Data Collection Project, 1974-1977) - a tool for research and monitoring changes in the Gulf of Aqaba-Eilat includes more than 3,000 plankton samples collected in the Project Preserves in our invertebrate collection. The information on all these plankton samples, published 40 years ago in photographic reports of the Steinitz Laboratory of Marine Biology, has recently been collected and compiled and computerized. This information is accessible to researchers working on the Aqaba-Eilat Gulf region, for recognition, definition and comparison with new information. For example, from the group of planktonic crustaceans Hyperiidea, 46 species from the Gulf of Aqaba-Eilat were identified in samples from the project, of which no less than 37 species have never been reported from the Red Sea.

Photo: Igor Armiach

The project "The biota of the Red Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean - a survey of marine animals in Israel and its neighbors (1967-1972)"

The Department of Marine Invertebrates at the Hebrew University was changed beyond recognition and became an international collection thanks to the project "The Biota of the Red Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean (1967-1972)", created in collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In this project extensive sampling was done in the Red Sea, the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean Sea up to Rhodes. Tel Aviv University and the Research Station of the Fisheries Authority in Haifa (predecessor of the Israeli Sea and Lakes Research Company Ltd.) also assisted in collecting marine samples in this project. Other valuable items came to the invertebrate collection from the research project in the southern Red Sea that was carried out in 1962 in the area off the coast of Eritrea (Eritrea, Delak Archipelago). This project produced a large variety of collections and resulted in the publication of many research articles. The fossilized material from the vast assemblage collected in this project resides in the Invertebrate Collection of the Hebrew University. Sorting of the fossilized samples was carried out for years after the end of the project, but was stopped in 1998 and has not continued since then. In the sorting of the material, priority was given to that collected in the Suez Canal, around Cyprus, and in the Gulfs of Suez and Eilat. Some of the material collected on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea remains unsorted in the meantime. The groups sorted are: Nematoda, Gastrotricha, Kinorhyncha, Priapulida, Sipuncula, Annelida, Pycnogonida, Acari, Ostracoda, Copepoda, Phyllocarida, Mysidacea, Cumacea, Tanaidacea, Isopoda, Amphipoda, as well as Decapoda.When sorting, a certain part of each specimen was left in its original state to allow reprocessing in the future.

Catalog and documentation of bryozoa

As part of an international project of virtual access to collections financed by the SYNTHESYS Foundation, a registration and cataloging of all the bryozoan specimens in the collection was made. Later, some of the samples will be scanned with a scanning electron microscope and uploaded to the web for free access to researchers from all over the world. The work on the collection is done by the student Raz Elal with the help of Dr. Nega Sokolover at Tel Aviv University.

Photo: Igor Armiach