Meyer-Kaiser lab

"Be the kind of woman who, when your feet hit the floor each morning, the devil says 'Oh no! She's up!'" - Joanne Clancy My alarm went off at 7, like usual. As I picked up my phone to silence it, I noticed a text message from Kharis, my PhD student: "She's up!" I sank back into the pillows and let out a deep breath. Wonderful. She's up. Thank goodness.  "She" in this context is CATAIN , the camera system that my lab invented a few years ago. CATAIN is specifically designed to capture settlement - the process of a larva metamorphosing and attaching to its new juvenile habitat on the seafloor. A lot of animals die right after they settle, so it's really difficult to study settlement itself. Most of the time, researchers leave out fouling panels and then collect them with all the attached animals a few months later. The problem with that strategy, though, is you only see the sum total of everything that settled and everything that die

Settled larvae in my culture dishes I sat down at the microscope with a dish of anemone larvae in one hand and a glass pipet in the other. Time for a water change. For about a week and a half, I had been tracking everything I could about my Metridium senile larvae - size, shape, buoyancy, swimming speed, survival. All those parameters would inform a high-resolution model of their dispersal, so I needed to record everything.  Peering into one of my dishes, I noticed something I hadn't seen before: small blobs attached to the glass. They were about the size and shape of a larva, actually. Same color, too. I sucked up a little water with my pipet and blew it on one of the blobs. The blob did not move. It was firmly attached to the dish.  Zooming in, I noticed that the blobs had a bit of internal structure. A central point, some pale lines radiating out from it. A mouth and septa. Just like a juvenile anemone.  Ladies and gentlemen, we have settlement! Those blobs can only be one thin

Two project team members bringing the grab  on board Tioga , hopefully with a good sample! As a benthic ecologist, I've taken plenty of grab samples in my day. It's pretty much a staple of the field. You lower a grab over the side of a boat, scoop up some sediment, sieve it, and preserve the animals. Every benthic ecologist knows how to collect a good grab sample. I can't even tell you how time I've spent sieving sediment samples in the field. The whole process is second nature by now.  As you might guess, grab sampling is not second nature for everyone. Recently, I had the opportunity to bring others up to speed when a local consulting company asked me to partner with them. I joined the team on WHOI's boat, R/V Tioga , as the resident expert on benthic ecology.  It was a fun trip. Two of the consultants deployed and recovered the grab - they didn't need me for that part. But once the sampler was on deck, I had to check it. Ideally, you want a grab that fills t

A Metridium senile larva I pulled into the parking lot at work. It was 6:30 am. Every morning, I stopped by the lab before my safety training class to take care of my larvae. Every afternoon, I went straight back to the lab as soon as my training was finished. Sure, I was burning the candle at both ends, but I was getting amazing data.  I have wanted to study the larvae of Metridium senile for several years now. I actually had a lightbulb moment in 2017, when my husband dragged me to a dive show north of Boston. We had just started dating, and he wanted to get me interested in SCUBA diving (the plan may have worked a   little too well ). There was an exhibit at the dive show about the shipwreck Andria Doria , which rests just south of Nantucket. As we walked through the exhibit, I stopped short. Every photo of the shipwreck on display that day had the same species in it: Metridium senile . I new Metridium well - it was the dominant species on a shipwreck I studied in grad school.

I stood in the hallway of an academic building at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Sunlight filled the cathedral-like hall and glistened on the waters of the Cape Cod Canal just outside the windows behind me. Like all academic buildings, this one held classrooms and labs behind numbered doors. But education at Mass Maritime goes beyond topics you can learn at a desk. Large glass doors to my left were labeled "Diesel Engine Lab." Students wearing zip-up, grease-stained jump suits and hard hats filed in for their class. They gathered around a giant, hulking piece of metal - a diesel engine, probably from a ship. I guess if you're going to fix them for your career, you have to learn on the real thing.  Out in the hallway, I was wearing my standard work-casual outfit: leggings and a fleece. But over top, I had a full-body harness, work gloves, a hard hat, and protective eyewear. My feet were clad in steel-toe shoes. Twin lanyards with quick-release hooks dangled from my hi

I got to the lab at 6:30 am. I was due at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy for all-day safety training starting at 8, so I wanted to check on my fluffy anemones beforehand. Just to make sure they weren't spawning, you know? Over the past few weeks, I had tried light shock, heat shock, cold shock, combination light-heat shock, and just standing over them, staring them down. Nothing seemed to work. They probably weren't going to spawn for me. I pretty much knew it was going to be a useless trip. But the literature said spawning can happen spontaneously right after dawn, so I had to check. Just to be sure.  You can probably tell where this is going.  Yep, I had sperm in one bin and eggs in another - from two different females, even! All three spawning individuals were different colors, too! That meant I had gametes from a cross-section of the population. Amazing!  Metridium senile eggs (and one dividing embryo!) I looked at my watch. 6:45 am. I was due in Bourne at 8:00, and i

For the fiftieth time that day, I heard a high-pitched toddler voice say "arriba." I looked down to see Sebastian standing near me, hands in the air. Arriba. Up. The little stinker was teaching me Spanish.  I lifted Sebastian, rested his puffy, diaper-clad bottom on my hip, and gave his fleshy cheek a kiss. At just under 2 years old, he was unbelievably cute. He smiled at me - a saliva-filled, giggly, genuine smile. So stinking cute. Then he started wriggling and said "Runter" - German for "down."  For some reason, he always asked to be picked up in Spanish but asked to be set down in German.  This was our routine for days. Arriba. Runter. Arriba. Runter. Arriba. Runter. The kid was non-stop.  All of us at the Cape Cod National Seashore Don't get me wrong, it was an incredible visit. Sebastian's parents - one from Germany, one from Colombia - have been my friends for several years. I met Theresa when I lived in Germany in 2011-2012 and Juan a few y