Meyer-Kaiser lab

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...

Sarah's scallop scrub station In the Meyer-Kaiser lab, we do things our own way. We travel frequently, multi-task constantly, and work however the science requires. So when my technician, Sarah, asked if it was ok to take scallop shells to her parents' home over the holiday break, I did not hesitate for a second. Sure, why not! The photos speak for themselves. Sarah's assignment is to measure growth rings in the shells of scallops that I collected the last two summers. The scallops were already shucked , but scraps of tissue clung to a few of the shells. There was biofouling on the exterior of many shells, and for others, the growth rings were not very visible. Sarah's solution was to start by cleaning the shells before she measured any rings. She used dish soap and water to clean off the scraps of tissue. Each shell had to go through two wash-rinse cycles and scrubbing with a wire brush to make sure the growth rings were unimpeded and clearly visible. Then she soaked ...

I followed Dave up the stairs on to the deck of SS United States . The producer had asked if he could interview a few members of the project team, and he wanted to scout locations for those interviews. I kept him company while the camera crew switched out their gear. As we emerged into the sunlight, I noticed the deck under my feet was a different color. Most of the deck on the ship was rusty red, but this outdoor patch was shiny silver. Aluminum. I paused. I had already drafted a schematic with all my planned sampling locations on the ship - was this aluminum deck included? If not, then it should be. I made a mental note to re-examine my sampling scheme when I got home and include the aluminum deck.  Tim Mullane, COO of Colleen Marine, discussing his company's mammoth task of preparing the ship for sinking.  Dave shared his thoughts with me as we walked. "This would be a good angle," he commented. Then a few minutes later, "I like this light." I listened and pr...

Never before in my life have I worn mascara and a hard hat for the same event.  On the bow of SSUS in Mobile. Photo by Dave Clark.  Friends, I am in Mobile, AL, where the iconic passenger liner, SS United States , is being readied to become the world's largest artificial reef. I am the leader of a scientific team that will establish the baseline physical, chemical, and biological condition of the ship as soon as it reaches the seafloor, then return every year to monitor how it changes. By tracking changes to the habitat (i.e., the ship) and the biological community over time, we can answer fundamental biological questions and understand how anthropogenic habitats impact the ocean. I am beyond excited for the research we will do.  A few months ago, a film producer got in contact with my team at WHOI. He was looking to make an IMAX film about shipwrecks and wanted to feature SS United States . We had a few Zoom conversations to iron out details and connect the producer with...

Every year, sometime around September, I cross a mental threshold. My brain switches into Paper Mode. After spending most of my year on field work, proposal writing, and mentorship, I realize that I have not submitted any papers for the year. That is absolutely unacceptable to my achievement-driven personality, so I ignore my email, crunch through my data, and bang out all my manuscripts for the year. By December, my annual crop of papers is with my co-authors for comment or even submitted for publication. This year, my crop is higher than usual. Instead of my average 3 papers, I have 6 ready to submit. I'm actually surprised at myself - I have done a lot this year. I'm pretty excited about the papers I've written this year, so I'd like to tell you about each of them.  1) The Fram larvae paper - this is one of Kharis's thesis chapters. She did the actual writing, but I'm counting it in my "crop" of papers for the year because I supervised and advised h...