Tyla Banks: part 2

I love recruitment! Honestly, putting a panel down in the ocean and coming back to see what's grown on it is so fascinating. It feels like magic sometimes - I just leave some very simple pieces of plastic or limestone or glass in the water, and then I get data. There are usually very clear patterns, too. I have studied recruitment in the high Arctic, in Oregon, in Massachusetts, and now in Palau. 

One of the coral recruits on my tiles, magnified 30x.

For this experiment, the recruitment panels I'm using are limestone tiles, the kind you would use on a fireplace or a kitchen backsplash. I literally bought them at Home Depot. We have put those tiles everywhere. They sit in the bins with our corals so the larvae settle on them. They get deployed on racks next to PICRC for us to monitor closely. They are transplanted out at our study sites. We use limestone tiles for everything. 

Every trip for the last two years, we've left tiles behind at each of our study sites. This is the magic part: stick some tiles in the ocean, come back, have data. We started with 5 tiles per site, and then I increased it to 10. When our transplant and delayed metamorphosis experiments failed last year, I insisted on leaving the empty tiles behind just in case they collected any more coral recruits. This trip, I collected them all: 86 tiles in total. It's so many tiles that Cas has start calling me Tyla Banks. 

One of the coral recruits, magnified 10x.

Well, Tyla is happy this trip, because my 86 tiles yielded twice as many coral recruits as in past trips. I was averaging 20 - 30, and this time, I got 56. That's right, 56 little baby corals settling on my tiles. They will tell me all their secrets: who they are, where they came from, and how I can recognize their siblings in the future. 

The data I collect from the tiles will fold into our analysis of recruitment patterns across each of our study sites. Maikani analyzed all the photo data we had earlier this year and is working on a publishable manuscript. I'm so excited to add to her dataset and learn even more about recruitment on coral reefs!