Meyer-Kaiser lab

Back when I was an undergraduate, I did a project on the taxonomy of freshwater crabs in Lake Kivu, one of the Rift Valley lakes in sub-Saharan Africa. I had plenty of experience describing and differentiating species of African freshwater crabs, so my advisor decided I was ready to take on the project. There was only one problem: all the crabs looked the same. It's not that I was inexperienced - far from it - but for whatever reason, in Lake Kivu, all the species of crabs lost their defining spiky features and became little smooth crabs. I eventually found a few structures that differed between the species and wrote reliable descriptions, but the process was far from easy.  Then during Covid, when I started foraging in the woods around Massachusetts (partly as an excuse to get out of the house and partly as apocalypse preparation), I came across countless non-descript mushrooms. My identification guide warned against picking "little brown mushrooms" with no distinct feat...

"Life imitates art more than art imitates life." - Oscar Wilde Friends, we live in a fascinating world. Sometimes, it seems to me that there is an underlying structure ordering our lives. For me, that structure is largely composed of parallel lines: one line representing my scientific research, the other representing my personal experiences. The two seem eerily parallel at times.  I am a community ecologist. I spent my PhD years studying communities of animals to figure out how they were structured. What species lived best together, which ones preferred to be apart. Meanwhile, I moved across the ocean three different times, planting myself in a new culture each time. My experience reflected my scientific work: I was conducting a personal experiment in community assembly.  For my postdoc, I shifted my focus to an earlier stage of invertebrate life-cycles. I worked on larval settlement  while simultaneously settling down myself. My trans-continental wanderings led me to...

Fisherman John, State Senator Mark Montigny,  and archaeologist Calvin Mires after a roundtable discussion at the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center. Back when I was in college, the cafeteria workers put inspirational quotes on the centerpieces of our dining room tables. There was one that really stuck with me, though I'm sure if I tried to relay it verbatim, I would mess it up. I can give you the main message. It had to do with farming - or rather, farming as a metaphor for all other pursuits. For creative professions like science, you are not always in a harvesting season. Some seasons are for planting, others for pruning. Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is leave the plants in the ground and just let them grow. You'll get to harvest soon.  Patience has always been hard for me. I'm one of those people who wants to harvest, harvest, harvest - in fact, my ambition almost always outpaces the resources at my disposal. That's the main reason why a random qu...

Friends, it is the first day of spring. Dear goodness, did that sneak up on me. I didn't grow up in an environment that valued or even paid attention to natural cycles - my life was more tightly regulated by the school calendar than the sun. But as I've gotten older, I find myself paying more attention to the climate around me. Circadian and annual cycles in light. Patterns of wind , waves, and tide . I study how organisms survive and adapt in the marine environment, but I'm an organism too. I should pay attention to my habitat.  The onset of a new season is a chance for me to check in with myself. If winter is ending, I should have finished all my winter projects. The spring projects beckon. Am I ready? This winter, my focus was on proposal writing . I have cranked out multiple hefty, detailed plans for scientific studies that I want to do over the next few years. Each one has about a 10% chance of getting funded. All I can do now is wait.  There was one item on my win...

Photo by Laura Castañón It was a sunny Sunday morning in Danvers, MA. The second full day of the Boston Sea Rovers convention was about to get underway. Sea Rovers is the world's longest-running dive show, with 2026 being the 72nd year. And I was the first speaker on the morning schedule.   WHOI's Dive Safety Officer, Kim Malkoski , is also the President of Boston Sea Rovers. The connection has been mutually beneficial, especially this year, when a dedicated WHOI session at the Sea Rovers convention put our research center stage. I got to the presentation room plenty early, connected my laptop to the room's A/V system, and tested my slides. Show time. My presentation focused on shipwrecks, my favorite marine habitats. I knew the audience would be interested in hearing about shipwreck research, too. Recreational divers love learning about historical sites and seeing footage of the diverse animals that call them home. In fact, Sea Rovers presentations are a great way to learn...

One of my greatest pleasures as a scientist and mentor is helping others succeed. For me, time spent advising young students pays dividends both in discoveries made and in personal growth of my lab members. My intern, Olivia, is a shining example of what a determined young scientist can achieve.  Olivia Quintin in the Fisher-Reid lab at Bridgewater State. Photo by Carly McMahon. Olivia is a student at Bridgewater State University, just about an hour's drive from Woods Hole. She approached me about a year ago to inquire about internships, and I was able to bring her into my lab through WHOI's Guest Student program. She spent her summer analyzing an image dataset I had collected in Palau. By identifying the corals that live on shipwrecks, airplanes, and naturally-occurring coral reefs, we could tell how maritime heritage structures impact biodiversity in coral reef environments. The project was very successful, and  we submitted a paper for publication based on Olivia's data...

The frozen Woods Hole harbor at sunset Friends, it has been a weird winter on Cape Cod. For the third time in a month, I am watching out the window of my house, waiting for the arrival of predicted snow. This time, the forecast shows Cape Cod getting almost 3 feet of the white stuff. It will be wet, heavy, and hard to remove. I won't be able to leave the house for days.  The harbor in Woods Hole froze over this winter. Ice floes cover the sea surface near WHOI's pier, blocking in R/V Neil Armstrong . At just 41 N, Woods Hole is not a place that freezes over often - at least not in this century. The winter of 2026 has so far been exceptionally cold and snowy.  In the midst of this long, cold winter, I am busy with science - writing proposals , developing ideas , and revising papers. Late last fall, I submitted a swath of manuscripts for publication, to share my research results with the world. Now that a few months have passed, each respective journal has reviewed my work and...