Meyer-Kaiser lab

Dr. Meyer-Kaiser and Dr. Schrage "Grad students are like pancakes: the first one always comes out a little funky." - just a thing that academics say to each other Ladies and gentleman, I have incredible news: my very first PhD student, Kharis Schrage, has graduated! Last week, Kharis successfully defended her dissertation and completed the MIT-WHOI Joint Program. She has earned the title of Dr. Schrage.  I am immensely proud of Kharis. She joined my lab in the summer of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, when all field work was stalled and nobody know where the world was headed. Kharis wanted to focus her dissertation on the Arctic ecosystem, so she asked me to estimate the probability that I could get her to the Arctic within the 5-year program. I estimated 95%. In the end, Kharis made 5 trips to the Arctic during her PhD, including a few without me. She collected enough samples to fill an entire shelf of our lab freezer and enough data to fill its own hard drive. She prod...

With my husband, Carl, on a deco stop in Bonaire. Photo by Megan Applegate .  "I am currently on vacation in my natural habitat - underwater on a rebreather." - my automatic email responder over the past couple weeks About 2000 miles due south of my home in Massachusetts, there is a small desert island. The dry landscape is inhabited by tall cacti , feral donkeys , and blue-tailed lizards. Below water, the biodiversity is much greater - corals and snails and fishes abound. Historical relics of harsher times are visible above and below the waves, but now, the island's economy depends on tourism. This seemingly make-believe place is called Bonaire.  I've been to Bonaire several times, always for dive vacations. This year, my 2-week trip served a dual purpose. As a vacation, it allowed me time away from normal routines to reset and decompress. As a dive trip, it reinforced my technical diving skills and got me back up-to-date for scientific work underwater.  Showing ...

Friends, November is off to a very exciting start for my lab! A while ago, I was contacted by a reporter from CNN, Katie Hunt, who was curious about our eDNA project . You know the one I'm talking about - the pilot study my lab conducted to determine whether DNA collected from the environment could be used to locate human remains at archaeological sites. The study was a partnership with DPAA, a branch of the US Department of Defense that is responsible for locating, excavating, and repatriating the remains of all fallen US service members. They have thousands of open cases and were looking to speed up their process to provide closure to more families. My lab is one of the few in the country with equal expertise in archaeology and biology , so DPAA reached out to us. By sampling at sites with ongoing excavations, we were able to directly correlate eDNA results with findings of each excavation. That way, we could ground-truth whether eDNA was an effective methodology for locating hu...

The bow model. Photo by Terry Wolkowicz. Friends, there has been a very exciting development in my marine debris project . One of our main objectives was development of an interactive museum exhibit that teaches the public about the importance of shipwrecks to the marine habitat and the damage done to them by entangled fishing gear. And we have done it! All parts of the exhibit are finished, and two sections of our exhibit have already gotten public exposure! A key piece of our exhibit is a model of steamship Portland ’s bow , which became entangled with a trawl net between 2009 and 2019. Sculpted models of key species living on Portland show how the shipwreck provides habitat for marine species. You might remember that a few years ago, my lab collaborated with Sound Explorations to tell the tale of Portland and its biological community through music . We extended that collaboration for the exhibit – visitors can build their own musical chords to represent the communi...

A few months ago, I was chatting with a WHOI postdoc, Carolin. She casually mentioned that she had an idea for an experiment using coral larvae, but because no reef-building corals live in Massachusetts, she was going to do the experiment with oysters instead. Oysters are a poor analogue for corals - in fact, they're hardly comparable at all - but she felt it was her only option.  "What about anemone larvae?" I asked. Anemones should be very comparable to corals - both are cnidarians, so they have the same larval form, a planula.  VibrioBOD set up in a lab at WHOI "Well, that would be great," Carolin responded, "but where could I get anemone larvae?"  "From me," I answered. Her face lit up, and a collaboration was born.  The driving question for Carolin's experiment is "How do marine larvae react to sound?" A lot of experiments have addressed how adult animals react to sound - and in most cases the reaction is negative. Scallops...

"Sold out." The phrase kept ringing in my mind as I watched people enter Redfield Auditorium. Enough guests had registered to fill every single seat. I had never given a presentation to a sold-out crowd, but then again, I had never been billed as a VIP speaker alongside Brian Skerry and Sylvia Earle. I asked WHOI's Advancement team if they were sure of their choice. They were. So I took a deep breath and watched WHOI supporters file into the auditorium one by one.  Delivering my presentation in Redfield Auditorium. Photo by Katherine Joyce. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has launched a monumental effort: the largest campaign in history to support ocean science. As a not-for-profit institution, we are dependent on grants, contracts, and philanthropic gifts to continue doing what we do best. Federal funding for research has declined in recent years and is likely to face further cuts in the near future. Yet, we are in a critical time for ocean research, as the environ...

One-on-one lecture! Learning from Calvin was so fun. I met Calvin at Bridgewater State University. He held a spot for me in the parking lot and then showed me up to his classroom in the Anthropology building. He had just finished delivering his lecture on Myth and Culture to a room of bored undergraduates, and he was ready for a different kind of student. I laid down the armful of textbooks Calvin had loaned me the week before, took a seat in the front row, and pulled out my notebook.  Calvin wrote on the white board the title of today's class: Archaeology for Kirstin. By mutual agreement, we were both taking this lecture very seriously.  Calvin has wanted to teach me the craft of archaeology in detail for several years now. We've had small lessons - how to map a site , the parts of a ship, what is site formation . But most of those lessons were procedural. We were co-designing studies and discussing how to collect our data in the field, not the broader questions behind our pu...