Meyer-Kaiser lab

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...

"Happiness [is] a byproduct of a well-ordered life."  - the TV show The Gilded Age If the quote above is to be believed, I should be miserable right now. My house is absolute mayhem, and my lab is no better. I left town in an absolute flurry at the end of July, and my collateral chaos has sat in place ever since. On top of that mess are boxes of gear I brought home from the Solomon Islands , packages I should have shipped before I left, packages that arrived while I was away, and the usual array of dog toys and bones. Mayhem .  You might be wondering why I only posted once in August. Last time you heard from me, I was in the Solomon Islands, waiting to board a research ship. I had an amazing two weeks on board diving, collecting data, and doing the type of research I have wanted to do for years. I would have loved to tell you all about it. Unfortunately, the sites we were working on were incredibly sensitive, so the chief scientist asked me to refrain from posting. The disco...