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Flashes

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I was in a conference room with a large monitor on one wall and an equally massive white board on another. There was a faint smell of curry leftover from the Thai food we had ordered in for lunch. I rolled out my yoga mat in the narrow space between the central conference table and the wall - there was just enough space on the dusty concrete floor to accommodate me. As I settled into a cross-legged position on the mat, my dog, Kraken, laid down in the corner. He knew that yoga time for me meant naptime for him. A conference room was certainly not my usual yoga spot, but it was good enough for now.  It had been a long week. In fact, the week didn't even end on Friday evening like normal, because my husband had to work through the weekend. Kraken and I hung out at his office all day Saturday, just to spend time together before I left town.  I pressed into my hands, stretching backward into Downward-Facing Dog. Kraken twitched and snored in the corner. In the next room, my husban...

Kahuna

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Ladies and gentlemen, it is summer. For me, summer means field work. And this year, field work means scallops! This week, I spent 3 days on a scallop fishing boat, F/V Kahuna , collecting samples on Georges Bank. The goal of my research is to understand what environmental and biological factors control the growth rate for scallops, especially right after they settle on the seafloor. Ultimately, our results could help improve sustainability of the scallop fishery.  I had a similar trip last year - you might remember I spent a few days on F/V Three Graces and came home with plenty of scallop samples to measure (and eat)! This year, the fishing boat captain who was scheduled to take me out wanted to hit all 10 of my stations in one trip. That doubled the length of the trip and made me a bit nervous (I get pretty seasick...), but I decided to go along with the plan. I'm very glad I did! You see, I do get seasick, but I also acclimate. This year, we were out on Georges Bank long enoug...

Romance and Salisbury

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I packed my scrubber, filled my bailout tank, and folded my drysuit. I was excited for the next day's SCUBA dive. "Wow," I thought to myself, "Why don't I do this more often?" Yours truly underwater at the City of Salisbury shipwreck. Photo by Greg  Lewandowski. Then my alarm went off at 4:30 am, and I remembered why.  There is not a SCUBA charter company on Cape Cod, so if you want to go diving in my corner of the world, you have three choices: walk into the local pond , drive to Boston, or drive to Gloucester. In the last week, I have done the latter two. With a truck full of gear, I have raced down empty highways at 5:00 in the morning to join a charter boat of like-minded ocean addicts. Early wake-up calls aside, I have enjoyed every second.  I'm training right now for a research expedition. No, I will not tell you where I'm going (yet), but feel free to guess! Let's just say there will be a lot of diving, and I'm super excited about the...

25 and 50

Friends, I reached a milestone this week. My fiftieth scientific paper has been published online.  Not only is the paper in question #50 on my publication record, but it is also a particularly significant work in my career. This paper summarizes everything that is known about hard-bottom communities in the deep Fram Strait. I first became captivated by dropstones and the diverse communities that live on them in 2011. That simple fascination led to a decade and a half of research , exploration , and discovery .  My own research trajectory has developed in a much broader context: the Long-Term Ecological Research observatory HAUSGARTEN . This one-of-a-kind deep Arctic observatory was launched in 1999, and HAUSGARTEN data have demonstrated long-term changes in the Arctic Ocean ever since. In honor of HAUSGARTEN's 25th anniversary, my colleagues at the Alfred Wegener Institute decided to publish a special volume of research papers. My contribution was accepted as part of the vol...

The last of the bivalves

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Friends, it is an exciting day when a project gets finished! Recently, several volunteers  have been cranking away on a labor-intensive lab project, and the process is now complete! I am very excited to see all their efforts result in a dataset.  The project is all about change in the Arctic Ocean. As you probably know, the polar regions are warming much faster than the rest of the world ocean, but we have yet to grapple with what that means for biodiversity. In 2023, my graduate student, Kharis, and I decided to find out. She found an excellent scientific paper from the early 2000s about biodiversity of tiny animals living between sediment grains in a high Arctic fjord, Kongsfjorden. We were planning a sampling trip of our own to Kongsfjorden at the time, so Kharis suggested that we repeat the sampling design from that previous study. By comparing results, we could see how the Arctic environment has changed over two rapidly-warming decades.  Two of the bivalve species we...

Everything, underwater, all at once

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Friends, as you know, I have a busy career. Actually, "chaotic" might be a better word than "busy" - there are always numerous projects, papers, proposals, and people to manage. I basically live in a hurricane.  A while ago, I wanted to make a poster for my lab walls that described the situation. Inspired by the movie "Everything, everywhere, all at once," I tried using generative AI to create a poster titled "Everything, underwater, all at once" with myself as the main character. It didn't work. I'm not sure how many of you have played with gen AI recently, but it is not particularly good at taking instructions like "draw the person in this photo exactly."  Enter my husband, Carl. He's the Vice President of Hardware for an AI company, and he knows his way around the state-of-the-art tools much better than I do. He didn't want to mimic a movie poster - he wanted to make me a brand-new logo for my lab.  In order for you t...

Fe and Al

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About three times a day, I walk into Olivia's office, or she comes into mine. She inevitably has a question about a coral. We'll sit side-by-side and look at a photo on a computer monitor. We'll pull up the website Corals of the World , leaf through two identification books, and come to a conclusion together. We'll part ways for a few hours, then be back at it again.  Man, I love summer. Specifically, I love summer interns. Olivia came to our lab from Bridgewater State University, which is just about an hour up the road. She knew she wanted to research coral reefs, and she's specifically interested in molecular ecology. When she found out about my lab's Palau project , the choice was clear. We are delighted to have her.  A community of corals on the propeller of a shipwreck. Photo by Cas Grupstra. Right now, Olivia is identifying all the corals that live on two shipwrecks , an airplane , and the coral reefs that surround them. The dataset started as a side proje...