Meyer-Kaiser lab

Every spring, daffodils are the first flowers to bloom in Woods Hole. In fact, the emergence of their light yellow petals has become my personal signal that spring is underway. And Woods Hole is awash in daffodils this week. Meanwhile, in the lab, spring has sprung with a beautiful bloom of data. Over the winter, my technician, Sarah, spent countless hours huddled indoors, identifying corals living on shipwrecks. Her cold-weather grind of image analysis is now reaching its endpoint, and as the ground thaws outside, her painstaking annotations are emerging as fresh, green datasets.  Opening those data petals to achieve their full beauty is my job. This week, I have begun analyzing our data to find patterns, discover significant differences, and figure out how the biological community relates to the 3D structure of each shipwreck. My process involves making lots of figures , running every statistical test I can think of, then standing back  and letting the data speak to me....

I pulled off the highway and followed my phone's instructions to turn on Fourth Street. The rolling hills of Bethlehem, PA carried me into town like waves rippling onto a sandy seashore. A church steeple made of dark stone rose from the sidewalk on my left, piercing the evening sky with its spire. Low, square-ish homes lined the street on both sides, bearing architectural signatures from decades gone by. I stopped at a red light, and a man carrying a plastic shopping bag slumped across the street in front of me. As I approached downtown, the buildings became denser, the blocks shorter, all perpendicular lines that chafed against the organic arcs of the green hills surrounding. This gritty steel town in the smooth, rolling hills seemed an unlikely host for a marine biology research lab, but host it was. I had arrived at Lehigh University.  Nicole (center) with her advisory committee after her  dissertation defense. Congratulations, Dr. Pittoors! For the past several years, I ha...

Bethany told me to pick her up at the bus station. We had not seen each other in at least 6 years - in fact, "how long has it been" was a major topic of conversation on our car ride together. A lot has changed for Bethany since she was last at WHOI. For starters, she got a PhD, and I could tell. When I last saw Bethany, she was an inexperienced student just figuring out how to do science. Now, she is a seasoned professional with her own unique views on topics ranging from deep-sea biodiversity to data management to why exploration matters. It took us the full hour-long ride to Brewster and hour-long ride back to catch up.  Our destination in Brewster was the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History. I think of CCMNH as "the little museum that could." The facility is modest in size, but the content is high-quality. Displays range from the indigenous history of Cape Cod to native species in our waters, exploring human-environment relationships along the way. I actually cons...

A juvenile coral captured in our photo survey Friends, I am proud to announce that one of my scientific studies has appeared in print. Just this morning, Coral Reefs published my team's work on coral recruitment in Palau. We surveyed juvenile and adult corals at our study sites in 2021 - 2023 to understand how early life-history bottlenecks shape community composition. This work involved deploying and recovering tiles , conducting photo surveys , and identifying thousands of corals . In the end, we found that the community composition of juvenile corals was different from adults at the same site - but it's not entirely clear why. Most likely, dispersal limitation, post-settlement mortality, typhoon impacts, and the inherent difficulty of capturing the astounding diversity of Indo-Pacific corals all interacted to influence the patterns we observed.   I encourage you to read the study for yourself. You can find it here, in the journal Coral Reefs : https://link.springer.com/art...

Back when I was an undergraduate, I did a project on the taxonomy of freshwater crabs in Lake Kivu, one of the Rift Valley lakes in sub-Saharan Africa. I had plenty of experience describing and differentiating species of African freshwater crabs, so my advisor decided I was ready to take on the project. There was only one problem: all the crabs looked the same. It's not that I was inexperienced - far from it - but for whatever reason, in Lake Kivu, all the species of crabs lost their defining spiky features and became little smooth crabs. I eventually found a few structures that differed between the species and wrote reliable descriptions, but the process was far from easy.  Then during Covid, when I started foraging in the woods around Massachusetts (partly as an excuse to get out of the house and partly as apocalypse preparation), I came across countless non-descript mushrooms. My identification guide warned against picking "little brown mushrooms" with no distinct feat...

"Life imitates art more than art imitates life." - Oscar Wilde Friends, we live in a fascinating world. Sometimes, it seems to me that there is an underlying structure ordering our lives. For me, that structure is largely composed of parallel lines: one line representing my scientific research, the other representing my personal experiences. The two seem eerily parallel at times.  I am a community ecologist. I spent my PhD years studying communities of animals to figure out how they were structured. What species lived best together, which ones preferred to be apart. Meanwhile, I moved across the ocean three different times, planting myself in a new culture each time. My experience reflected my scientific work: I was conducting a personal experiment in community assembly.  For my postdoc, I shifted my focus to an earlier stage of invertebrate life-cycles. I worked on larval settlement  while simultaneously settling down myself. My trans-continental wanderings led me to...

Fisherman John, State Senator Mark Montigny,  and archaeologist Calvin Mires after a roundtable discussion at the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center. Back when I was in college, the cafeteria workers put inspirational quotes on the centerpieces of our dining room tables. There was one that really stuck with me, though I'm sure if I tried to relay it verbatim, I would mess it up. I can give you the main message. It had to do with farming - or rather, farming as a metaphor for all other pursuits. For creative professions like science, you are not always in a harvesting season. Some seasons are for planting, others for pruning. Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is leave the plants in the ground and just let them grow. You'll get to harvest soon.  Patience has always been hard for me. I'm one of those people who wants to harvest, harvest, harvest - in fact, my ambition almost always outpaces the resources at my disposal. That's the main reason why a random qu...

Friends, it is the first day of spring. Dear goodness, did that sneak up on me. I didn't grow up in an environment that valued or even paid attention to natural cycles - my life was more tightly regulated by the school calendar than the sun. But as I've gotten older, I find myself paying more attention to the climate around me. Circadian and annual cycles in light. Patterns of wind , waves, and tide . I study how organisms survive and adapt in the marine environment, but I'm an organism too. I should pay attention to my habitat.  The onset of a new season is a chance for me to check in with myself. If winter is ending, I should have finished all my winter projects. The spring projects beckon. Am I ready? This winter, my focus was on proposal writing . I have cranked out multiple hefty, detailed plans for scientific studies that I want to do over the next few years. Each one has about a 10% chance of getting funded. All I can do now is wait.  There was one item on my win...

Photo by Laura Castañón It was a sunny Sunday morning in Danvers, MA. The second full day of the Boston Sea Rovers convention was about to get underway. Sea Rovers is the world's longest-running dive show, with 2026 being the 72nd year. And I was the first speaker on the morning schedule.   WHOI's Dive Safety Officer, Kim Malkoski , is also the President of Boston Sea Rovers. The connection has been mutually beneficial, especially this year, when a dedicated WHOI session at the Sea Rovers convention put our research center stage. I got to the presentation room plenty early, connected my laptop to the room's A/V system, and tested my slides. Show time. My presentation focused on shipwrecks, my favorite marine habitats. I knew the audience would be interested in hearing about shipwreck research, too. Recreational divers love learning about historical sites and seeing footage of the diverse animals that call them home. In fact, Sea Rovers presentations are a great way to learn...

One of my greatest pleasures as a scientist and mentor is helping others succeed. For me, time spent advising young students pays dividends both in discoveries made and in personal growth of my lab members. My intern, Olivia, is a shining example of what a determined young scientist can achieve.  Olivia Quintin in the Fisher-Reid lab at Bridgewater State. Photo by Carly McMahon. Olivia is a student at Bridgewater State University, just about an hour's drive from Woods Hole. She approached me about a year ago to inquire about internships, and I was able to bring her into my lab through WHOI's Guest Student program. She spent her summer analyzing an image dataset I had collected in Palau. By identifying the corals that live on shipwrecks, airplanes, and naturally-occurring coral reefs, we could tell how maritime heritage structures impact biodiversity in coral reef environments. The project was very successful, and  we submitted a paper for publication based on Olivia's data...

The frozen Woods Hole harbor at sunset Friends, it has been a weird winter on Cape Cod. For the third time in a month, I am watching out the window of my house, waiting for the arrival of predicted snow. This time, the forecast shows Cape Cod getting almost 3 feet of the white stuff. It will be wet, heavy, and hard to remove. I won't be able to leave the house for days.  The harbor in Woods Hole froze over this winter. Ice floes cover the sea surface near WHOI's pier, blocking in R/V Neil Armstrong . At just 41 N, Woods Hole is not a place that freezes over often - at least not in this century. The winter of 2026 has so far been exceptionally cold and snowy.  In the midst of this long, cold winter, I am busy with science - writing proposals , developing ideas , and revising papers. Late last fall, I submitted a swath of manuscripts for publication, to share my research results with the world. Now that a few months have passed, each respective journal has reviewed my work and...

A figure that I made with my collaborator, Irina, showing where Metridium lives in the NW Atlantic. Colors on the map show average bottom temperature, and shipwrecks  <17C are black dots. The surrounding pictures are frame grabs I took from dive videos on YouTube.  Friends, it is proposal season! This year, I have deadline stacked on top of deadline, and every day brings a new effort to keep my lab funded through the next few years. I'm kind of obsessed with an anemone called Metridium senile right now. It's very common on shipwrecks in the North Atlantic, and I just have to figure out why.  I hypothesized that Metridium larvae were highly variable - some only swam for a short amount of time, others swam for longer, and that meant that a few larvae could disperse much farther than their siblings. To test this hypothesis, I collected adult anemones from a local jetty , cultured their larvae in the lab, and measured as many things as I could - their size, shape, buo...

It's been a while since I wrote a post at the end of a work day . Sometimes the words just come . They sizzle in my head all day, then bubble to a boil until I let them vent through my fingertips. Sometimes I can almost hear the steam.  We are exactly 16 days into the Year of our Lord 2026, and the days just keep on coming. Most of the time on this blog, I tell you about the highlights of my job - the publications , the discoveries , the thrills and surprises , the news coverage , the literal mountaintop experiences . I have an amazing life. But not every day is an epic adventure in ocean science . Most days, I just answer emails.  Today was one of those days. I biked to work , sat at my desk, and weeded through the things that needed doing. Friends, if you'll indulge me, let's take a moment to pause and appreciate all the little things  that constitute the process of science - not the big moments, but the everyday tasks. They are no less important, for sure.  Pre...

The beginning of a new calendar year is proposal season! Federal research funding agencies have received their annual budget allocation, and scientists scramble to get a piece of the pie. Deadlines stack up, and stress can run high - especially for the administrative staff who handle proposal submissions. Everyone at work feels like a headless chicken for a month or two.  The last living Porites fragment.  Photo by James Wainaina. This year, I have an ambitious list of proposals to write. One of them is actually a revision of a proposal that I wrote last year with my colleague, James. Our proposal was rejected because the reviewers claimed we did not have enough preliminary data to prove that we would be successful. James and I have spent the last 6 months gathering preliminary data to include in the revised proposal. So far, we have met most of our data goals - all but one, in fact.  James wanted to isolate viruses from the mucus of our study species, the coral  Po...

Friends, we have had a very exciting start to the year in the Meyer-Kaiser lab! Two manuscripts reporting the results of our research have been published online! The first manuscript is a short communication. Back in 2021, I deployed a lander in the Arctic deep sea to try and collect larvae of benthic invertebrates from right above the seafloor. It worked, and we collected a wide range of organisms. One of the specimens reminded me of a sponge larva , so I brought it home and sequenced it. It was not a sponge larva; in fact, it belonged to a group that I had never even heard of before. My not-sponge turned out to be an understudied deep-sea protist that had never before been collected from the Arctic Ocean - two different species, in fact. Even though I don't work on protists, I thought other researchers should know what we had found. The short communication reports on the occurrence of our weird protists in the deep Arctic, so other researchers can go look into them more. Our s...