Meyer-Kaiser lab

Sabine was my intern in 2017. She had just finished high school. I was about a year into my postdoc. A few times a week, we sat next to each other at the lab bench. She sorted larvae; I worked on whatever needed doing. She asked questions; I answered them. The data she generated were included in a paper I published a few years later.  We've sporadically kept in touch ever since, mostly through email and Christmas cards. When Sabine sent me a message that she was going to be in Woods Hole, it was a welcome surprise.  Dropping Sabine off at R/V Atlantic Explorer - the calm  before the crazy busy expedition! She's a PhD student now. This bit of news was exciting for me to find out - not only has Sabine stayed in marine science, she's pursuing research at the highest level of academia. I'm delighted to think that her chosen career will bring Sabine across my path repeatedly over the next few years.  We met at my house for dinner, and it was so good to catch up with Sabine.

Kharis with her opening slide I once signed an email to my lab as "Your Cheerleader in Chief." Let's be honest: that is one of the ways I view myself. A big part of my job is mentoring, and to me, mentoring sometimes means cheering from the sidelines when my lab members succeed. I am with them in the struggles, and I am with them in the victories. I love the days when I get to be a cheerleader.  Recently, I got to cheer on my PhD student, Kharis. She is currently about a year out from the end of her PhD program, and that meant she was due to give a seminar. PhD students in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program present part of their dissertation research in their final year, mostly as a means to gain experience discussing their research in a public context. The seminar also reduces the amount of material they'll have to cover during their hour-long defense and lets the department know what the student has been up to.  I know I'm biased, but Kharis rocked it. I was very proud

"White blob" in all its blob-ish glory It's always a good day when data land in my inbox. Recently, I have been working to identify larvae and juvenile invertebrates that I collected on R/V Polarstern earlier this year. Some of you might remember that I used a fine mesh net on an epibenthic sledge to collect larvae in the Arctic deep sea. I also had the opportunity to collect larval traps I had left on the seafloor 5 years earlier. Needless to say, identifying larvae from the Arctic deep sea is a challenge. DNA sequencing is absolutely necessary for identifications. So when the sequences show up in my email, I get excited.  My lab has refined a great protocol for DNA extraction and amplification for single larvae. It's working reliably now, even for some challenging specimens . This week, I was delighted to get successful sequences from my Polarstern samples.  There were some surprises, to be sure. The biggest surprise was from a specimen I had named "white

Friends, I have good news! Team Porites has published our research on spawning, larval development, and settlement of massive Porites corals in Palau.  In 2022 and 2023, I led a field team studying reproduction in Porites corals  - when they spawn, how big their eggs are, how the larvae develop, when and where they settle. This work involved a lot of late nights , a lot of patience , and a lot of diligent note-taking . Our study was largely observational, but it's still incredibly valuable information for anyone working on mounding Porites .  You can read the full paper in Invertebrate Biology :  https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ivb.12447

It is autumn in New England. Hurricanes sweep through the North Atlantic. The wind speed along the beach is swifter than ever. The surface of the ocean is disrupted by white-capped waves. The weather is anything but pleasant.  F/V Kristen S. in port in New Bedford So if a scientist needed samples from, say, Georges Bank, they would be completely dependent on the weather forecast. When a window of calm seas opened up, they might even drop everything and dash to New Bedford to hop on a fishing boat. That, my friends, is exactly what I did.  You might remember I have a project right now on Atlantic sea scallops, Placopecten magellanicus . I went out on a fishing boat over the summer to collect data on scallop density, water temperature, food supply, and predator abundance at stations on Georges Bank. Out of all the parameters we measured (and tasty scallops we were allowed to keep), there was one piece missing: scallop larvae. You see, scallops spawn in the fall. If I was going to meas

The jaws of this polychaete now  fill Sarah's nightmares. Photo by  Sarah Zuidema. Back when I was in grad school, I spent 2 weeks on a ship in the Arctic. It was part of a class I was taking on polar benthic ecology. The expedition gave me a great opportunity to collect panels that I had deployed about a year prior and actually generated data that turned into one of my dissertation chapters . Aside from my personal research, though, the class itself was incredibly valuable. Most of the time at sea was spent collecting and sorting  seafloor samples from different Svalbard fjords. Sorting seafloor samples means identifying lots of worms. So basically, I spent 2 weeks at sea identifying worms.  Boy am I glad that I did.  There are an unbelievable number of worms in the ocean. According to the World Register of Marine Species, there are 12,834 valid species of polychaetes globally. (There's even a species of  polychaete named after me .) And polychaetes are just the segmented ma

The ROV we used to record video today I was on a Zoom call about my offshore wind project  when one of the consultants brought up a familiar name: Marine Imaging Technologies. The small Massachusetts-based company had been sub-contracted to collect video data using a remotely operated vehicle. As the benthic ecology expert on the project, I was responsible for ensuring the video recordings were high quality and clearly showed the seafloor community. I needed to join Marine Imaging staff for a day at sea.  I gave a wide smile. I was about to get paid to spend a day on a boat with my friends. Marine Imaging Technologies owner, Evan, and his deputy, David, were key players in our 2019-2020 Stellwagen Telepresence Project , and we collaborated on a project in the Gulf of Mexico in 2022, too. When I stepped onto R/V  Catapult  at 6:30 am, both Evan and David greeted me with warm hugs. The last time I saw them was in April in Portland, Maine, for a public event celebrating the Portland