Meyer-Kaiser lab

Costa Nova beach The workshop ended in mid-afternoon on the third day, so I had a chance to explore more around Aveiro. When I mentioned to another researcher that I was thinking of walking to the beach, he shook his head. I would have to walk along the highway, he said, but he was going to work in a café out there and would be happy to drive me. We grabbed one more researcher who was interested, hopped in the car, and headed to Costa Nova. Barra lighthouse in Costa Nova Driving out of Aveiro on the highway, we passed the Ria Aveiro estuary and large salt flats. Aveiro is on the coast, but the space between the town and the beach itself is filled with pools where seawater is evaporated to harvest salt – one of the major industries in Aveiro in historical and modern times. There has been trade between Portugal and Norway since about the 12 th century, with the Portuguese exporting salt and importing salted codfish. Striped homes in Costa Nova The beach reminded ...

I really enjoy scientific workshops. Unlike conferences or seminars, where we just talk about our research, workshops have a defined goal and a short amount of time in which to achieve that goal. The discussions have more direction, and we make measurable progress by the end. It feels very productive. The objective of this workshop was to collect and synthesize ideas for long-term collections of larvae in the deep sea, for example through an observatory. We met at the University of Aveiro for three days, and by the end of the second day, we had our ideas pretty well together. We had presentations from participants and open discussions, which eventually resulted in some solid, tractable directions and even an outline for a paper. Each of us left Aveiro with an assigned section to write. It will be very exciting to watch the draft come together! The workshop reminded me how fortunate I am to hold a solid place in the marine biology community. I am affiliated with some truly worl...

Streets in Aveiro tend to have very long names describing historical events. This bridge was covered in ribbons with text on them Ceramic factory Barcos moliceiros - essentially Portuguese gondolas

A couple of months ago, I got an e-mail from my friend, Luciana . She was planning a workshop on sustained collections of deep-sea larvae. There are a number of ocean observatories around the world with long-term infrastructure, and she wanted to collect ideas for integrating larval samples into those observatories. I was invited, and after a bit of planning, friends, I am in Aveiro, Portugal! I had always heard about Aveiro from Luciana. It was her hometown, and while we worked together in the same lab in Oregon , she would tell me about the city of canals and beaches and pottery. This is my first chance to experience it myself. Aveiro is like many towns with marine biological institutions - it is located right on the coast, is not necessarily the prettiest place, has lots of wind and waves and nature, and hosts a vibrant community of researchers. The size, layout, and state of maintenance of the city actually reminds me a lot of  Bremerhaven, Germany . I feel right at home. ...

A Crepidula fornicata larva. You can see its spiral shell, and the lob hanging down is its velum. After two weeks of successfully keeping Crepidula fornicata adults alive in the lab , I am happy to announce they have given me larvae! Now my experiment really takes off. I'm investigating whether the conditions brooding mothers are kept in have carryover effects on the larvae. My mothers are in two different temperatures and only half of them are getting fed, so I can test those two crossed factors (high/low temperature and food/no food). To tell if there are any effects on the larvae, I'm measuring several variables - how big the larvae are when they're spawned, how quickly they grow, and how long it takes them to become competent to settle. Crepidula larvae swimming in a dish under the microscope. The clear lobes on each individual are the velum. Measuring larval size is a tricky game. I collect a random sub-sample of individuals by sucking up some water from...

"What's a work-life balance, and should we buy one for the lab?" - online meme I walked out of my office at 4 pm, and it felt weird . Wet and happy after my dive in Hathaway Pond I've been going full-steam-ahead for the last several months, pulling 10-hour days, coming in on weekends, and doing whatever necessary to complete my self-assigned work. It was time for a break. So on the first sunny afternoon in weeks, I loaded my dive gear into the car and headed out to Hathaway Pond . I hadn't been in the water in months. After diving for 21 days straight in the tropics last  December with Carl , I stayed on land for the New England winter. I had one dive in March this year, and that was it. It was high time to get back in the water. It was an amazing dive. Hathaway Pond is not the most exciting dive site by any measure - it's just a little freshwater pond - but whatever aquatic life the pond had to offer came out for me in full force yesterday. As ...

Well, friends, I wish I could tell you everything in science went as planned, but I can't. Gear implodes ; weather turns bad ; organisms die; and every once in a while, the Navy gets in your way . Tube City indeed! I wish I could tell you the experiment I had set up two weeks ago worked perfectly, but that's not true. Over half my organisms died. Crepidula fornicata is an incredibly resilient organism (I've even sanded their shells before and they've lived!), but I figured out the one thing they can't handle: having their feet exposed. Crepidula  have to have a substratum to grip onto , or they keel over. So I started over. I collected more individuals and re-vamped the design of my experiment. Now each individual has its own jar, and they're all happily attached to the rock or shell I found them on. Dividing the individuals into their own jars had one main effect: the number of tubes increased by a factor of 3! My experiment really is Tube City! So ...