Order: part 2

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 in remote environments. We deployed CATAIN in Kongsfjorden, Svalbard in January 2023. Kharis recovered and redeployed it in September that year, and then the camera finally returned to the surface last fall, in October 2024. Between those two deployments, we collected over 20 months of continuous data. We have a daily record of who settled and who died on the CATAIN end cap for over a year and a half. 

Going through all those images takes time, so thankfully, we had help from an excellent high school student, Erik. He used CATAIN data for a science fair project during his sophomore year and then volunteered to keep processing CATAIN images as a junior. Now, in Erik's senior year, he is getting to see the fruits of his contributions as results from Kharis's analysis coalesce into a scientific manuscript. 

My lab lives and dies by our white boards. While I was in the Solomon Islands, Kharis covered the largest white board we have in printouts of her preliminary figures, notes to herself, and academic scribbles. When I returned home, we stood together in front of the board for a good 3 hours one day and decided how to present our data. Every good scientific study tells a story, so we had to frame ours. The white board stayed intact until a week later, when Kharis showed Erik the story we had crafted. Now, her only remaining task is to write it all down. 

I am extremely proud of my lab for the work that we have done, data we have collected, and discoveries we have made. Kharis is poised and ready to finish her PhD strong!