Meyer-Kaiser lab

With my husband, Carl, on a deco stop in Bonaire. Photo by Megan Applegate .  "I am currently on vacation in my natural habitat - underwater on a rebreather." - my automatic email responder over the past couple weeks About 2000 miles due south of my home in Massachusetts, there is a small desert island. The dry landscape is inhabited by tall cacti , feral donkeys , and blue-tailed lizards. Below water, the biodiversity is much greater - corals and snails and fishes abound. Historical relics of harsher times are visible above and below the waves, but now, the island's economy depends on tourism. This seemingly make-believe place is called Bonaire.  I've been to Bonaire several times, always for dive vacations. This year, my 2-week trip served a dual purpose. As a vacation, it allowed me time away from normal routines to reset and decompress. As a dive trip, it reinforced my technical diving skills and got me back up-to-date for scientific work underwater.  Showing ...

Friends, November is off to a very exciting start for my lab! A while ago, I was contacted by a reporter from CNN, Katie Hunt, who was curious about our eDNA project . You know the one I'm talking about - the pilot study my lab conducted to determine whether DNA collected from the environment could be used to locate human remains at archaeological sites. The study was a partnership with DPAA, a branch of the US Department of Defense that is responsible for locating, excavating, and repatriating the remains of all fallen US service members. They have thousands of open cases and were looking to speed up their process to provide closure to more families. My lab is one of the few in the country with equal expertise in archaeology and biology , so DPAA reached out to us. By sampling at sites with ongoing excavations, we were able to directly correlate eDNA results with findings of each excavation. That way, we could ground-truth whether eDNA was an effective methodology for locating hu...