Strawberry milkshake: part 2

My last night in Palau, Cas insisted we go to Bem Ermii. It's the food truck across the bridge in Airai that serves burgers, fries, and milkshakes. He needed a strawberry milkshake, he said, to make sure we got more spawning. After working in the ocean for the last 12 years and monitoring coral spawning over the last month, I have to admit that I understand why sailors are stereotypically so superstitious. Events seem so random sometimes, you try everything you can to gain control. Strawberry milkshake it was. 

Maikani "Selfie Queen" Andres got all four of us and the 
sunset in a single image.

We ate our dinner on the dock and watched the sunset - that was Maikani's idea. It was beautiful. Not just the sunset, but sitting on a boat trailer with my team, passing around the squeeze bottle of mayonnaise, eating in relative silence, just enjoying each other's company and the natural world around us. I needed that time to zoom out and appreciate the moment. 

It feels weird to be leaving when I am, because the science is not over. Cas and Matt each independently decided to spend part of their planned vacation doing experiments instead, and Maikani stepped up to help. They'll keep monitoring for spawning over the next few days, and whether there are larvae or not, I'm sure some nudibranchs will be subjected to the "Pest Plug." I'm actually really curious what they'll find. 

Every field trip is a journey of a thousand years. You spend every moment so focused on what you're doing that it can be difficult and even disorienting to transition out of it at the end. You spend all day, every day with the same people, working tightly together, and then all of a sudden, you're alone. It's harder than it sounds. 

This trip is no exception - it was darn near Homeric in its action and duration. It actually represents a bit of a turning point for me, because I've started to see myself as a coral biologist. As many of you know, my background is in polar deep-sea biology - I'm used to working in much colder temperatures and deeper depths than your average coral reef. I only discovered the magic of SCUBA diving as a postdoc, just 5 short years ago. When Hanny and I first came to Palau in 2018, I told myself it was a blip. I would step into the coral world for one project and stay just as long as there was an interesting question to be answered about larval dispersal. 

Famous last words. 

Every scientific project leads to 5 others, and you would think I would know that by now. The more you learn about the world, the more you discover there is to be learned. There is no such thing as "just one project." 

To be fair, I've had this experience before. It took four years and five trips to Svalbard for me to see myself as a polar biologist. I didn't think of myself as a shipwreck ecologist until someone at WHOI applied the term to me - four years after the publication of my first shipwreck paper. I'm now starting to embrace the identity of coral biologist as well. At my core, I am a larval ecologist - I study the colonization and connectivity of isolated, island-like habitats - but I'm fortunate to work at an institution that grants me the freedom to pursue that research in three different systems at the same time. Arctic, shipwrecks, and corals - they form the legs of a research tripod in the Meyer-Kaiser lab. 

I'm also feeling more at home in Palau. I bought a SIM card and got a local phone number this trip. I have plenty of experience with the government bureaucracy, and my face is recognizable by regulatory agents and PICRC staff. I get a lot of "Hey, you're back!" whenever I apply for permits. 

Honestly, a big part of feeling at home in Palau this trip was dealing with things when they went wrong. I scratched a rental car. I got registered in the public health system when I caught covid. I had to get my laptop repaired. I met the governor. I never did any of those things in Germany or Norway, where I lived for much longer periods. Honestly, I've never done any of those things in the U.S. 

As far as the research goes, we didn't actually get everything we wanted, but we never expected to. Our experiment was pretty ambitious, and we were going in blind. As far as any of us know, nobody has ever spawned and reared Porites lobata in the lab before. People have seen it spawn in the field in April and May, which is why we planned the trip when we did, but that's it. It would have had to be an incredibly lucky, one-in-a-million convergence of circumstances for us to go all the way from "well, we think they spawn in spring..." to full-fledged crosses of known individuals from 6 different sites. 

Overall, I am incredibly proud of us. We not only conducted the first ex situ fertilization and larval rearing in our species; we got the larvae to settlement. We outplanted tiles - one-sixth of the full plan, but we did it. We got there. We proved that the type of experiment we planned is possible, given enough time, money, and people. 

Not just that, but we made copious observations of the embryological development in P. lobata and even worked together to draft a paper about it. Once we get to the point of submitting it for publication, the paper will serve as a valuable resource for anyone else wanting to work on this species - including our future selves. 

This trip, we did a lot. 

We started an experiment on delayed metamorphosis - the first one I know of in corals. 

We implemented a back-up plan using nubbins that will still address our overarching scientific question.

We preserved samples that will allow us to sequence the genome of Porites lobata for the very first time. 

We collected an immense amount of data on recruitment using photos and tiles. 

We discovered that the different genetic lineages of our species have different responses to heat stress. 

We dove on two shipwrecks. 

We tracked recovery of a coral reef from disturbance. 

We connected with Palau's nature and culture. 

Most importantly, we built a strong, multi-national collaborative team. You know what, we have enough data on my hard drive for 5 scientific papers, maybe more, and the thing I am the most proud of this trip is our team dynamic. Cas, Matt, and Maikani are each amazing scientists and also fantastic people. I appreciate and admire each of them for so many reasons - Cas's attention to detail and skill at experimental design, Matthew's perceptive interpersonal skills and his deep connection to nature, Maikani's expressive enthusiasm, curiosity, and absorbent, quick-learning mind. We got along so well. I am also glad that we were able to involve some local volunteers - MJ and a scientist from PICRC named Louw. We shared our time, our food, our experiences, and our knowledge. We worked side-by-side and built each other up. I am so proud of this team. 

I'm a bit more emotional about leaving Palau this time than I expected, but part of that might be the exhaustion. My husband says he can hear in my voice that I'm not just day-tired, I'm trip-tired. I believe him. 

The good news is that I get to come back. We have two more trips to Palau planned for this project, and if we have the money for it, we may choose to do more. We have already spent multiple lunch breaks daydreaming about experiments we could do during the fall trip, and I can tell it's going to grow in scope and ambition. I am looking forward to seeing the plan take shape. 

For now, I must bid farewell to Palau, to the corals that I love, to the team that I admire, and to the ocean that keeps my heart beating. It's not "goodbye," it's "see you soon."