Dreaming on paper
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...