Meyer-Kaiser lab

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...

My new intern, Olivia, and my dog, Kraken, look on as I check the ROV video feed.  Friends, it is a good day when I get to spend some of my work time outside! This week, I am preparing for summer research on a scallop fishing boat . A key tool for data collection is my lab's small remotely-operated vehicle  (ROV) - I'll use it to record videos from the seafloor to estimate the density and size distribution of scallops at each of my sampling stations. The last time our lab's ROV was used, it was in the Arctic. Kharis, my graduate student, used the ROV to recover our beloved settlement camera, CATAIN . Since being in the Arctic with Kharis, our ROV has been disassembled and shipped across the world. I needed to set up the vehicle and make sure it was working before heading out to sea myself. I took the ROV pieces out their respective boxes one by one. Everything came flooding back - part names, how they fit together, the proper order of operations. I'm no engineer, but ...

Friends, today, a new paper describing results of my lab's research has been published in The Biological Bulletin ! This paper stems from the trip to Svalbard that my grad student, Kharis, and I made in January 2023. At 79 N, we experienced 24-hour darkness while collecting larvae. This period of the year is called the polar night and has a profound impact on the marine ecosystem. Contrary to expectations, we found a high diversity of larvae during the polar night. Our experiments showed that some larvae were even actively feeding or competent to settle. The polar night is an active period! This research sparked a lot of questions about adaptations of the species we found to extreme environmental conditions. I am proud of the study that Kharis and I did!  You can read our paper here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/736174 For a more accessible explanation of our research, check out this episode of Changing Seas :  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxKs0AHdTDU ...

Hollis and me Friends, I have a genuine question for you: how in the world is it June? Every single month in 2025 seems to go faster than the last. I cannot wrap my head around it already being summer.  Recently, I celebrated a milestone for an intern in my lab. Hollis joined the lab through his high school's mentorship program, and he's been with us for the last two years. In that time, Hollis has definitely grown - he has worked on three different projects, become the best Pluteus Finder I've ever known, and even helped me design a method for separating tiny scallops from the rest of a plankton sample. More recently, I got to teach Hollis how to extract DNA from larvae. He's become an integral part of the team.  Every year, the mentors and mentees gather for a Mentorship Luncheon at Hollis's school to share what they have achieved together. I took the ferry to the Vineyard and then caught a ride with another mentor to the school. The Luncheon is a really mean...