Emergence

Kraken sleeping  in my office. 

My dog, Kraken, knows exactly when I finish a task. He sees me lean back from my computer after hours of concentration, and he knows that he's about to get a walk outside. It never fails. I emerge from the dense cloud of focus, take a deep breath, and look over at him. The fuzzy puppy, who just a few minutes before was dead to the world in the middle of a nap, has lifted his head and slid his front paws off the couch. If I confirm his suspicions by standing up, he bolts to the door. He knows the routine well. 

We had several moments of emergence this week. I spent five days working through task after task on my to-do list, in an effort to button up my lab before a trip. And it worked. 

An example CATAIN image, showing a diverse fouling 
community that has settled on it. 

The greatest accomplishment was resubmitting a paper about my camera system, CATAIN. Some of you might remember that I worked with WHOI engineers to design a camera system that could capture settlement, and we deployed it under the WHOI pier for initial tests in 2020-2021. I've been trying to publish a paper about CATAIN so that other researchers can build their own systems and study settlement in remote environments across the world. It's been a slow process, mostly because I have never written a methods paper before. I had no idea how much detail to include, and it was honestly difficult to know how to structure the paper too. It's been rejected twice. Each time, I got helpful feedback, so I'm hoping this round will be successful. 

On the positive side, another paper that I've been working on recently got accepted! This paper actually stems from my research in Palau in 2018. We found that thermal tolerance in Porites lobata corals  is genetically driven. There are four lineages of P. lobata corals in Palau, and two of those lineages have higher thermal tolerance than the other two. They're also more common inside lagoons than on exposed outer reefs. It was very satisfying to see this paper finally accepted, because it's been years in the making. The study also lays the foundation for everything my team is doing in Palau now, so it's great to have that information printed in a reputable journal so we can cite it. 

It has been a long week, but I'm feeling great about my lab's accomplishments. Now, I can emerge from the fog and take Kraken outside.