Satisfied

"You strike me as a woman who has never been satisfied"

- "Satisfied" from the musical Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda

One of my coral recruits on a tile from Taoch, photographed
under a microscope at 30x magnification.

Ever since I started coming to Palau in 2018, I have been on the hunt for baby corals. I want to figure out how well-connected the reefs at my various study sites are, and to do that, I'm trying to compare what species settle at a site to what species are already present there as adults. The adults are easy - you can see them. But collecting newly-settled coral spat is an extreme challenge. I have tried deploying tiles during a spawning season. I have tried collecting plankton to find coral larvae. I have tried picking up bits of coral rubble to see if there were any spat living there. I have never been satisfied. 

Last November, I decided to deploy tiles and leave them in place for longer - 6 months. I figured this would give the tiles plenty of time to accumulate a nice biofilm and become an attractive place to settle. I thought leaving them for so long would increase the chance of baby corals settling on the tiles. 

A coral recruit on a tile from Ngerur, photographed under 
a microscope at 20x magnification.

It worked - kind of. I got the tiles back this week and have spent long hours looking at them under my microscope. Out of 30 tiles deployed at 6 sites, I got 20 individuals. I photographed each of them and saved them in ethanol. Back in the lab at WHOI, I'll extract their DNA and use it to identify each of them to species. Those 20 individuals should give me some clues as to which species are recruiting at each of my study sites and whether there are any species recruiting out of place - at a site where adults of the same species don't occur. The analysis should be interesting. 

I have good data. But I'm still not satisfied.