Spawn Watch 2022

One of our coral parents sitting in its tank during the nightly
spawn watch. This photo was taken using a blue light and a 
yellow filter, so you can see the red and green fluorescence.

Friends, it is that time again: the week after the full moon. It is coral spawning time. 

This is our second full moon in Palau. Last month, a few individuals of our study species spawned, and we got enough larvae for one experiment. We didn't have enough individuals for our full transplant experiment, so this month, we're hoping for more. 

We collected all our parent corals from our study sites and set them up in seawater tanks at PICRC. Every evening, we isolate them in small tanks to keep the eggs and sperm separate if they do spawn, then check them every half hour between 7 and 11 pm. We call this part of the day Spawn Watch. It usually involves Cas, Matt, and me sitting in the wet lab for four hours, quietly working on our own computers. One of us gets up at the top and bottom of the hour to check our colonies. So far, nobody has spawned. 

That's ok. The full moon was only yesterday, and last month, the spawn came 3 days after the full moon. We're probably in for a few more boring evenings. 

Cas showing some preliminary results from our heat stress
experiment to the discussion group

In the meantime, our days are free. There's another visiting research group at PICRC right now, so we actually took the opportunity to sit down with them for a science discussion. We met over lunch in PICRC's outdoor tank lab, brought food, ideas, and laptops, and explained to each other what we were working on. The session was incredibly informative, and I'm very glad we did it. The other team had meaningful comments and questions about our work and even helped us hammer out some methods for quantitative analysis of coral color. We asked questions about their research and had a great discussion about coral restoration. 

Things are relatively calm at the station right now. I really hope we get more spawning!