Meyer-Kaiser lab

This week, I have made a point of exploring the natural world around me, not just the city. I made some very cool finds! Just west of Dayuan, I found rice fields! The plants grow in a very wet environment, and you can see there's a pool of water around their roots. Taoist temples are ubiquitous, even seemingly in the middle of nowhere. A lot of homes have potted plants or small gardens right outside their doors. Lattice structures like this are common - I guess this is the Taiwanese version of suburban gardening. The species identification app I use said this was a Caribbean leafleather slug ( Saransinula plebeia ). They're invasive in Taiwan! Speaking of invasive species, this is a giant African land snail ( Lissachatina fulica ). It's another non-native pest in Taiwan.   Taiwan is really a hub for invasive gastropods - this is the channeled apple snail ( Pomacea canaliculata ), which is native to South America.  I walked to the Taiwan Strait! It was low tide, so I got t...

Friends, it has been an interesting week. After my conference wrapped up, I was supposed to just stay one extra night near the Taipei Airport and then fly to my next destination. I was scheduled to join a research expedition in another western Pacific country. Things did not go according to plan.  I got sick and was unable to fly, so I ended up spending an extra week in Taiwan. Tell you what, if you're going to be unexpectedly stuck anywhere in the world, Taiwan is not a bad option. It's safe, there's great public transportation , and you can find ready-made meals in convenience stores on every street corner. Barely anyone speaks English, but I downloaded Mandarin to the translator app on my phone. All in all, I'm doing fine.  I decided to spend this week doing what I do best: exploring and learning. My hotel is in a suburb of Taipei called Taoyuan, specifically the neighborhood called Dayuan. I have made it my mission this week to explore every corner of Dayuan. The sm...

While we were at the Bureau of Cultural Heritage (BUCH), I finally got an answer to a question I have had for a long time. First, I need to give you some background.  The anchor encrustation A few years ago, Calvin used the term "encrustation" in my presence. My ears perked up. There are so many terms in archaeology - like, established jargon in the field - that sounds funny or even made-up to my ears: historiography , ecofacts, lifeways. Those terms regularly drive me nuts. But "encrustation" was something I could immediately grasp - a crust on an artifact, mostly made from calcium carbonate.  "Hey Calvin," I asked. "Is encrustation a biological or chemical phenomenon? As an artifact gets covered in calcium carbonate, is that because there's a purely chemical process like precipitation going on, or is the encrustation from the shells and skeletons of organisms?" He couldn't answer me. In fact, none of the dozen or so archaeologists I ha...

Warships in Taiwan's waters, representing  different eras of Taiwan's history.  After the 2025 International Conference on Underwater Cultural Heritage wrapped up in Kaohsiung, our group of international scholars still had a few items on our agenda. First, we visited a special exhibit at the National Science and Technology Museum called "War and Shipwrecks."  The exhibit was very well-done. It delved into the close relationship between armed conflict and the creation of shipwrecks. Most importantly for me, the exhibit showed the different eras of underwater cultural heritage in Taiwan's waters. I'm not very familiar with Taiwanese history, so I was grateful for the clear framework. Each era was exemplified by a warship, which was highlighted throughout the exhibition. Taiwan was first inhabited by Polynesian indigenous people . Warships from the Ming dynasty (1368 - 1644) are among the oldest shipwrecks in Taiwan's waters. Dutch colonists arrived in the ea...

It was the second day of the 2025 International Conference on Underwater Cultural Heritage. My fellow speakers and I gathered in our normal meeting space at the National Science and Technology Museum, while conference staff set up and guests registered. I wandered into the hall. To my surprise, the room right next door to us was equally busy - people were filing into what looked like a classroom. Each person had a long, rectangular case on their back. I watched with curiosity as they unpacked what looked like string instruments. I had to know more.  Thanks to one of the conference staff, I learned the instruments are called Erhu. The erhu is a bowed instrument with two strings (A and D), and its sound is iconic in Chinese culture. Back when I was a child, my dad traveled to China for work and brought me back a collection of CDs with Chinese folk music. The erhu was featured in nearly every song. I was fascinated to see this instrument in person here in Taiwan.  Over the course...

Conference hosts, speakers, and attendees Friends, this week, I am in Kaohsiung, Taiwan! I am an invited international scholar at the 2025 International Conference on Underwater Cultural Heritage. My favorite part about conferences is meeting new people, and I have had an excellent chance to do that in Kaohsiung.  I've learned there's a proper way to introduce yourself to a new colleague in Taiwan. Every single person who approached me followed the same procedure, so it must be deeply culturally ingrained. First, they were prepared with a business card in hand. Nobody actually calls them "business cards" in Taiwan; instead, they are "name cards." Western and Eastern naming conventions are so vastly different - think about trying to repeat someone's name back to them to see if you have it right (you won't) and then remembering it for more than a second (good luck). The "name card" convention circumvents all of that. The person gives you thei...

My phone vibrated. It was Lynn. "I am in the airport pickup hall of the second terminal." She had tagged me and sent a photo of herself holding a sign with my name on it. Wow, celebrity treatment - I don't often have my name on a sign for airport pickup.  It took me a second to find Lynn in the cavernous arrivals hall, and she spotted me before I spotted her. "Kirstin!" she exclaimed. "Hello, how are you? Welcome to Taiwan! Would you like some coffee?" She handed me a plastic cup of iced coffee with a lid - she must have bought it just a few minutes ago. My body doesn't handle caffeine well (at all), but I briefly considered actually drinking it. How do you turn down a spontaneous, thoughtful gift from your host when you land on the other side of the world?  International scholars on our way to Kaohsiung: Ole Varmer,  Andy Viduka, Jung Young-Hwa, me, and Elena Perez-Alvaro. We climbed into a van outside and then stopped at an airport hotel to pick ...

I was in a conference room with a large monitor on one wall and an equally massive white board on another. There was a faint smell of curry leftover from the Thai food we had ordered in for lunch. I rolled out my yoga mat in the narrow space between the central conference table and the wall - there was just enough space on the dusty concrete floor to accommodate me. As I settled into a cross-legged position on the mat, my dog, Kraken, laid down in the corner. He knew that yoga time for me meant naptime for him. A conference room was certainly not my usual yoga spot, but it was good enough for now.  It had been a long week. In fact, the week didn't even end on Friday evening like normal, because my husband had to work through the weekend. Kraken and I hung out at his office all day Saturday, just to spend time together before I left town.  I pressed into my hands, stretching backward into Downward-Facing Dog. Kraken twitched and snored in the corner. In the next room, my husban...

Ladies and gentlemen, it is summer. For me, summer means field work. And this year, field work means scallops! This week, I spent 3 days on a scallop fishing boat, F/V Kahuna , collecting samples on Georges Bank. The goal of my research is to understand what environmental and biological factors control the growth rate for scallops, especially right after they settle on the seafloor. Ultimately, our results could help improve sustainability of the scallop fishery.  I had a similar trip last year - you might remember I spent a few days on F/V Three Graces and came home with plenty of scallop samples to measure (and eat)! This year, the fishing boat captain who was scheduled to take me out wanted to hit all 10 of my stations in one trip. That doubled the length of the trip and made me a bit nervous (I get pretty seasick...), but I decided to go along with the plan. I'm very glad I did! You see, I do get seasick, but I also acclimate. This year, we were out on Georges Bank long enoug...

I packed my scrubber, filled my bailout tank, and folded my drysuit. I was excited for the next day's SCUBA dive. "Wow," I thought to myself, "Why don't I do this more often?" Yours truly underwater at the City of Salisbury shipwreck. Photo by Greg  Lewandowski. Then my alarm went off at 4:30 am, and I remembered why.  There is not a SCUBA charter company on Cape Cod, so if you want to go diving in my corner of the world, you have three choices: walk into the local pond , drive to Boston, or drive to Gloucester. In the last week, I have done the latter two. With a truck full of gear, I have raced down empty highways at 5:00 in the morning to join a charter boat of like-minded ocean addicts. Early wake-up calls aside, I have enjoyed every second.  I'm training right now for a research expedition. No, I will not tell you where I'm going (yet), but feel free to guess! Let's just say there will be a lot of diving, and I'm super excited about the...

Friends, I reached a milestone this week. My fiftieth scientific paper has been published online.  Not only is the paper in question #50 on my publication record, but it is also a particularly significant work in my career. This paper summarizes everything that is known about hard-bottom communities in the deep Fram Strait. I first became captivated by dropstones and the diverse communities that live on them in 2011. That simple fascination led to a decade and a half of research , exploration , and discovery .  My own research trajectory has developed in a much broader context: the Long-Term Ecological Research observatory HAUSGARTEN . This one-of-a-kind deep Arctic observatory was launched in 1999, and HAUSGARTEN data have demonstrated long-term changes in the Arctic Ocean ever since. In honor of HAUSGARTEN's 25th anniversary, my colleagues at the Alfred Wegener Institute decided to publish a special volume of research papers. My contribution was accepted as part of the vol...

Friends, it is an exciting day when a project gets finished! Recently, several volunteers  have been cranking away on a labor-intensive lab project, and the process is now complete! I am very excited to see all their efforts result in a dataset.  The project is all about change in the Arctic Ocean. As you probably know, the polar regions are warming much faster than the rest of the world ocean, but we have yet to grapple with what that means for biodiversity. In 2023, my graduate student, Kharis, and I decided to find out. She found an excellent scientific paper from the early 2000s about biodiversity of tiny animals living between sediment grains in a high Arctic fjord, Kongsfjorden. We were planning a sampling trip of our own to Kongsfjorden at the time, so Kharis suggested that we repeat the sampling design from that previous study. By comparing results, we could see how the Arctic environment has changed over two rapidly-warming decades.  Two of the bivalve species we...

Friends, as you know, I have a busy career. Actually, "chaotic" might be a better word than "busy" - there are always numerous projects, papers, proposals, and people to manage. I basically live in a hurricane.  A while ago, I wanted to make a poster for my lab walls that described the situation. Inspired by the movie "Everything, everywhere, all at once," I tried using generative AI to create a poster titled "Everything, underwater, all at once" with myself as the main character. It didn't work. I'm not sure how many of you have played with gen AI recently, but it is not particularly good at taking instructions like "draw the person in this photo exactly."  Enter my husband, Carl. He's the Vice President of Hardware for an AI company, and he knows his way around the state-of-the-art tools much better than I do. He didn't want to mimic a movie poster - he wanted to make me a brand-new logo for my lab.  In order for you t...