Tyla Banks

Cas and MJ are both super into this TV show called Drag Race. It's a performance competition for drag queens, and apparently, it's quite the spectacle. Just check out some of the queens' names: Maddelynn Hatter, Sham Payne, Hedda Lettuce, Meatball, Karen From Finance, Eggz Benedict, and last but not least, Bob The Drag Queen. Each one of them is more ridiculous than the last. 

So naturally, our two resident Drag Race enthusiasts have spent some long rides on the research boat coming up with drag names for every member of our team. What is my name, you ask? That, my friends, would be Tyla Banks. 

That's right, apparently my imposed drag queen alter ego is based on my love of putting limestone tiles in the ocean. Some tiles here, some tiles there, Tyla Banks. 

We collected all the tiles I had outplanted last spring just a few days ago, and I've spent long hours in the lab looking at them. I am on the hunt for baby corals, you see. I want to know what species recruit at each of my study sites. I've deployed tiles every time I've been in Palau, and I'm starting to accumulate a nice little dataset. 

I'm even starting to notice some patterns. The recruits I'm getting fall into only a handful of categories. There are ones that look like sunflowers, ones that are all spiky, ones that are purple with holes, and that's about it. I'm wondering if only a few species are recruiting to my tiles. That low diversity compared to the extreme richness of coral species around Palau would be pretty surprising and actually a really cool result. Of course, coral babies can be hard to tell apart, so I won't know for sure until I get home and run the genetic analysis. 

I'm really glad I am getting good data with my tiles! 

One of my coral recruits on its tile. This is the one I call the sunflower morphotype.

A "spiky" coral juvenile on one of my limestone tiles.

This one is interesting - it's purple with holes.