Meyer-Kaiser lab

Corals living near the rudder of a WWII ship in Palau Friends, I am excited to announce the publication of a scientific paper from my lab! This paper concerns the communities of animals that live on underwater shipwrecks , airplanes , and natural coral reefs in Palau. Back in 2022 and 2023, while I was in Palau for my Porites project , I used extra days to investigate some of the WWII remnants in Palau's waters. My team produced a dataset of photos showing corals, sponges, and oysters living on each habitat. Last summer, I asked my intern, Olivia, to identify all the species in the photos. Her analysis showed clear differences between the corals living on the ships and planes compared to the naturally-occurring coral reefs that were right next to them. We thought this finding was incredibly interesting. The difference can't be driven by larval dispersal because the wrecks and reefs were only meters apart. They had to be driven by the substrates themselves - the metals that ma...

Whenever I give a public presentation about shipwrecks, I refer to our seafloor containing "layers of history." Vessels piloted by Indigenous peoples, European colonists, and Americans, as part of transportation, energy, and industrial sectors - all of these vessels rest on our seafloor, representing centuries of our shared history as a seafaring species.  On Manresa Island, the "layers of history" are literal and obvious. The 23-acre island was used as a private retreat, first by an individual and then by a Jesuit society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1950, a coal-fired power plant was built on the island, which distributed ash into the surrounding salt marsh and expanded the island's size to 125 acres. The power plant switched from coal to oil in the 1970s, then stopped producing power in 2013. Nowadays, a birch forest covers the area where coal ash filled in the salt marsh. If you take a sediment core on Manresa Island - as terrestrial researc...