Stride of pride

I pulled into the driveway at Maikani's house at 8 am. I had an hour to shower, change clothes, eat breakfast, and get back to the lab. Honestly, it felt a bit weird. I had crashed on the couch in Cas and Matt's apartment at PICRC after we finished with all the spawning work and then stayed to collect data points at 4 and 7 am. I was wearing the same clothes as the day before and probably looked pretty disheveled. An uninformed onlooker might conclude that I had spent the night with a date and was doing the proverbial "walk of shame" as I came home the next morning. Tell you what, if I had a date that night, it was with Coral Number Thirteen, our stud male. But this was no walk of shame. It was a stride of pride. 

Porites lobata larvae.

I am so proud of my team. We had a banner April spawning season. Out of 100 corals we collected from the reef and kept in our tanks, 16 individuals spawned. That's the same percentage we got last year, but a higher total number because we had more corals overall. Those 16 individuals have told us so much already - when they spawn, what size their eggs are, how fast they develop, and who they can fertilize. We have an incredible dataset. 

I wanted to figure out one more thing: do larvae inherit their thermal tolerance from their parents? We know there are different genetic groups in our species, Porites lobata, and that each of those lineages has a different ability to tolerate high temperatures as adults. Lineage 1 is pretty sensitive and bleaches or dies right away when the water heats up; Lineage 2 is really flexible and can handle the heat; Lineage 3 would prefer to live in a hot tub. But what about their babies? 

So we set up a larval thermal tolerance experiment. We took small sets of larvae from each of our crosses (where we crossed one parent with another) and split them into two treatments: a normal, non-stressful temperature (30 C) and a thermal stress (36 C). Every 3 hours, we counted how many larvae survived in each treatment from each cross. 

Can you guess whose larvae did the worst? The best? We had one cross with two Lineage 1 parents, and their larvae tanked hard - all of them in the heat treatment were dead in like a day. On the other hand, our stud coral, Number Thirteen, belongs to Lineage 3, and his offspring did fantastic. It was super exciting to see the differences!

We designed the experiment to be short and intense - data collection every 3 hours for just a day and a half or two days. All the larvae would certainly be dead by then, right? Nope. Porites lobata, man, it's an amazing species. The larval thermal tolerance experiment ran for five days. We ended up terminating it not because everybody was dead, but because some larvae had started settling in the experimental bins! We tried to stress them out, but they settled instead! Crazy!

To be perfectly honest, I'm pretty glad we're done with the larval thermal tolerance experiment, because it was a ton of work to collect data every 3 hours. I showed up at the lab at 4 am, napped on the guys' couch between time points, then came home just long enough for breakfast and a shower 4 days in a row. It was a bit much. 

But I tell you what - we have amazing data. That is why I can do my stride of pride.