The Stellwagen paper

It is always a good day when my work culminates in a publication! This week, the latest paper from my lab was released in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series. You can read it here. 

Back in 2019-2020, I led an interdisciplinary team on an investigation of shipwrecks in Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. Some of you might remember that project - it had a huge outreach component, with telepresence broadcasts so anyone could follow along as we explored. I loved the telepresence! It was a blast to speak live with our audiences, especially students, and answer their questions about shipwrecks. 

After the field work ended, I still had a lot of work ahead of me. I spent hours reviewing the footage we had collected to make sense of how shipwrecks function as habitats. When covid hit, I let my ambition run wild - while stuck at home, I added old recordings to my analysis, until I had personally watched every single video recorded from a shipwreck in SBNMS since it was founded in 2002. 

An example frame grab from the SBNMS imagery archive: 
fluffy anemones (Metridium senile) on the Portland bow.

My ambition paid off. Using the data I gleaned from those old videos, I was able to test several hypotheses about shipwreck communities to understand how they function. I derived predictions from island biogeography theory (some of you might remember that I wrote my PhD on island biogeography theory) and tested whether the shipwrecks in SBNMS fit those expected patterns. To put it simply: they didn't.

Instead, I found different patterns in SBNMS. The community composition was extremely dependent on depth and location of the shipwreck, and there were some species that only lived on the deepest wrecks. These results add context to shipwreck ecology: when a shipwreck lands on the seafloor, it becomes part of a marine ecosystem that already exists. The community that colonizes it depends in part on what's already there. 

I'm very excited to see this paper finally in print, and I hope you enjoy it!