Meyer-Kaiser lab

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...

A figure that I made with my collaborator, Irina, showing where Metridium lives in the NW Atlantic. Colors on the map show average bottom temperature, and shipwrecks  <17C are black dots. The surrounding pictures are frame grabs I took from dive videos on YouTube.  Friends, it is proposal season! This year, I have deadline stacked on top of deadline, and every day brings a new effort to keep my lab funded through the next few years. I'm kind of obsessed with an anemone called Metridium senile right now. It's very common on shipwrecks in the North Atlantic, and I just have to figure out why.  I hypothesized that Metridium larvae were highly variable - some only swam for a short amount of time, others swam for longer, and that meant that a few larvae could disperse much farther than their siblings. To test this hypothesis, I collected adult anemones from a local jetty , cultured their larvae in the lab, and measured as many things as I could - their size, shape, buo...

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 ...