Meyer-Kaiser lab

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...

We were three hours outside the port of New Bedford, MA, before I thought of it. I stepped up the stairs to the wheelhouse and got the captain's attention.  "Hi! Um, what's the bathroom situation on board?" I asked.  "Oh!" he jumped up, stepped away from the pilot's chair, and strode out onto the deck.  I followed the captain outside and watched with curiosity. First, he grabbed a 5-gallon bucket and filled it partway with seawater from a hose. Just inside the open engine room door, he set the bucket down, grabbed something off the wall rack of tools, and laid it on top of the bucket. He seemed to be digging for something else in the pile of jackets and boots. I walked slowly toward the engine room as my curiosity morphed into horror. The bucket had a toilet seat on it. The captain found what he was looking for - a roll of toilet paper - and hung it on the tool rack on the wall.  He gestured toward the engine room door. "You can close this..." ...

Friends, I am excited to tell you about another publication from my lab! This one has been a long time coming. Back in 2021, a collaborator from the Alfred Wegener Institute approached me on Polarstern and asked if I would be willing to take on a project. I had analyzed photos of the seafloor from one of the HAUSGARTEN stations when I lived in Germany (2011-2012), and more photos were collected from the same station in the years since. Could I analyze the new images and continue the time-series, my colleague asked. I was already familiar with the station and the best person to track how it had changed over time.  I accepted my collaborator's calling - and I even used the project as an opportunity to train a student of my own! My 2022 Summer Student Fellow, Kimberly , marked all the animals in seafloor images, and I double-checked her work. We made it through two of the sampling years over that summer, and then Kimberly did two more as part of her undergraduate thesis. She ran sta...

I am getting pretty darn familiar with what Woods Hole looks like at 6:30 am. That's the time I've been getting to work each day since collecting my anemones . Last year, the anemones spawned on September 5 and 10, giving me enough eggs and sperm for a great experiment. I reared the little larvae to settlement and collected a ton of data. This year, I've been monitoring them daily since August 30. And I haven't gotten anything.  Why haven't the anemones spawned yet? Your guess is as good as mine. Marine animals can be very particular.  Kharis's white board. Believe it or not, this passes for order in my lab. In the meantime, order is being restored to my lab. My grad student, Kharis, took a big step recently by ordering the results for her fourth and final dissertation chapter. It has been exciting to see the story take shape.  Kharis's fourth chapter uses data from CATAIN , the camera system we invented to study settlement and post-settlement mortality i...