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, buoyancy, swimming speeds, swimming behaviors, and how long they stayed larvae before settling. As it turns out, Metridium larvae are tiny - so tiny, in fact, that they couldn't possibly counteract the forces of the ocean and they get carried passively wherever the water may go. What really varied was the development time. 

I ran my experiment at four different temperatures. At 20C (room temperature), the larvae started settling after 3 days, and the last larva died on day 5. Less than a week, and they were all gone. But at 5C, about refrigerator temperature, one larva was still swimming after 43 days. That's a month and a half! 

The proposal I'm writing now builds directly on this research. I'm working with a fantastic physical oceanographer named Irina. Together, we plan to figure out how Metridium disperses to shipwrecks in the NW Atlantic. The first step is collect more data on Metridium's pelagic larval duration - how long the larvae drift in the water before settling. I will hand over all the data I collect to Irina, and she'll plug virtual larvae into a numerical model of ocean circulation. By simulating larval dispersal in the model, we'll be able to predict how far larvae can travel, investigate how their dispersal differs between years, and ultimately figure out how the connectivity of island-like habitats is likely to change as the ocean warms up. 

I'm very excited to submit the proposal - I have been dreaming of this project for several years, and it is time to finally do it! Please cross your fingers, send good vibes, or do whatever you do to hope we get funded!