Meyer-Kaiser lab

The end of summer this year felt like the end of a roller coaster. I had been speeding along at who-knows-how-many miles per hour, banking around tight curves , turning upside-down , enjoying  the thrills  with my hands in the air, but then all of a sudden, it came to a stop. The coaster car entered a dark tunnel, screeched to a halt, and I found myself disembarking before even registering that the season was over. Oof.  The last major event of my summer came in the final week of August. The team for my Marine Debris project marked a major milestone by deploying our robot, ResQ, in the ocean. ResQ was designed by my collaborator, Robin Littlefield, and his team of engineers, specifically to recover derelict fishing gear or other equipment lost at sea. The vehicle's design was inspired by a leatherback sea turtle, to make ResQ as sleek and immune to entanglements as possible. After two years of work, ResQ was ready for her first in-field demonstration, so we gathered on a...

My husband, Carl, walked into Redfield Auditorium. He had told me he was coming, but it felt surprising all the same. Carl hadn't set foot in a WHOI building in years. Yet here he was, showing up in the middle of the day to support me.  The lights dimmed, and I launched into my practiced speech: 45 minutes of scientific storytelling. I shared my memory from 2018, when a PhD student's seminar in that exact same auditorium sparked my interest in coral larvae. I explained how I formed a collaborative team to undertake research in Palau. I walked the audience through our questions , our approaches to answering them, and the curve-balls that hit us along the way. My story was told in data, but it was also deeply human - behind every discovery was a collaboration, a team , even a family.  While studying coral communities , we became a community ourselves.  When I finished speaking, my body relaxed. I exhaled deeply. With my pre-practiced script at an end, I answered free-fo...

Friends, I'm happy to announce that another Meyer-Kaiser lab paper is out today! My postdoc, Johanna Weston, spent her time at WHOI developing a plankton sampler that could go to full ocean depth without breaking the bank. Her vision was to enable hadal research worldwide, including countries without huge financial resources to dedicate to science. Her sampler, DeepZoo, got its first deployments locally before moving onto the East Pacific Rise and eventually Argentina. The results of Johanna's efforts have appeared today in a published paper in Methods in Ecology and Evolution . You can read it here:  https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.70392

Early morning low tide at the jetty Sometimes on this blog, I use the titles of my posts as a motif: a series of posts with similar titles will tell a cohesive story or use a unifying metaphor. My last post was "Waking up," and this installment is "Early morning." The two posts must be related, right? Nope, I've just been getting up at the crack of dawn. No metaphor needed - this time, the title is literal.  August is anemone spawning season. My early-morning routine started last Friday, when I went to the Cape Cod Jetty in Sandwich, MA for the 6:30 am low tide. Metridium senile lives in the protected spaces between rocks in the low intertidal, so I got up close and personal with the jetty. I crouched with my feet in the water, my knees in algae, and my hand tucked under a boulder as I scraped slimy creatures off the stone with my finger nails. More than once, I could feel a fisherman's eyes on me in a mix of confusion and judgment. After only half an hour,...

The end of every research cruise is disorienting . For weeks, I have seen the same finite group of people ,  and we spontaneously formed a miniature society. Then all of a sudden, I am back where I started - in this case, home in Woods Hole - and surrounded by an entirely different group of people. It feels almost like waking up from a really good dream.  I took some time off after the Heroic Age cruise . In fact, the day after I stepped off the ship, my husband and I flew to the Midwest for a long weekend with my family. My experience at sea slipped entirely out of my mind as I played in a water park with my 6-year-old nephew. The Labrador Sea was nowhere in my thoughts as I cheered with my sister-in-law at a kitschy dinner theater. If the expedition was a dream, that long weekend was the delightful delirium that comes in the early light of dawn.  So here I am friends, back at home. By day, I write my dreams on paper , asking the funding powers-that-be to grant me more ...

R/V Atlantis in Woods Hole, just prior to departure Yours truly briefing the science party on the biological goals for our expedition. Photo by Ken Kostel. This sign used to say "scientific laboratory." The room became the home base for CBC News on board, so they amended the door sign appropriately.  Rocky cliffs of Newfoundland We could see Greenland in the distance from the Terra Nova site. Sunset on an iceberg, seen at the Terra Nova site. The ROV team hosted a ping pong tournament on the transit home.  Every game had three players: two humans and the motion of the ship.

One of the marine technicians aboard Atlantis has a sticker on her water bottle that grabbed my attention. It features a smiling cartoon frog with the caption, "The horrors persist, but so do I." What a fitting sentiment for our last few days at sea.  After leaving Terra Nova , we steamed due south into the North Atlantic. A shorter route would have been to steam southwest, along the Canadian coast, but a large storm covered most of the Labrador Sea. We skirted around it, far enough from the epicenter to be safe but not so far as to excessively extend our travel time. As Atlantis pitched and rolled in confused 8-ft seas, I retreated to my bunk. As this point in my life , with the depth of sea-going experience that I have, I knew it was pointless to fight . So I took my anti-nausea medication and hunkered into bed, only venturing upstairs to eat carbohydrates every few hours.  Thankfully, my body acclimates quickly . After a few days of my eat-sleep-medicine cycle, I emerge...