Those bright bands

Maikani's gel. Every bright band represents a successful PCR.

"I'm gonna streak this!" Maikani practically squealed. She was making a motion with her hands that I had only ever seen in situations of extreme excitement - rubbing one palm over the other as if doling out cash. She pulled out her phone and snapped a picture of the gel, then began furiously typing. Is that what she meant by "streaking" - something to do with an app? 

As it turns out, yes. Apparently "streaking," no longer a term for running nude through public, means sending a photo to every single one of your contacts on SnapChat. Tell you what, I only ever feel old when I hear Maikani talk about social media. 

She deserved to be excited. We had just gotten an amazing result - the most successful PCR the lab had seen in months. After seemingly endless troubleshooting of DNA extraction and amplification methods, it seemed we had succeeded. In fact, I was reminded why I had settled on our methods in the first place: they worked great for corals. 

Maikani is using small coral juveniles that I collected from Palau to figure out what species recruit where. The current samples, from 2022, build on a dataset I started in 2018 with Hanny. We put out tiles at each of our study sites for corals to settle on, then collected the tiles 6 months later and scraped off the juveniles to figure out who they were. Then we can relate the species composition of juveniles to adults at the same site and figure out how similar they are.

This project is so exciting to me because I have no idea what it's going to show. Maybe recruitment at each site is heavily influenced by the adults that are already there. Maybe there's no relationship, and only a few species recruit everywhere. Maybe there's higher richness at inner sites. We honestly have no idea. 

That successful gel is a key step in finding out. I'm glad Maikani got to "streak it." She deserves to be proud of her success.