May I spawn?

Porites lobata sperm - 
check out that tail! Photo
by Matthew-James Bennett.

Friends, this trip to Palau was so long (over a month and a half) for exactly one reason: spawning. We wanted to be in Palau for both the April spawn and the May spawn to give ourselves the best possible chance of answering our questions. We got a lot of spawning in April - 16 individuals. That gave us plenty of opportunity to cross gametes, test which parents are compatible with each other, and produce larvae that we could use in experiments. But as you know, friends, I am never satisfied. The voice in my head was kind of like Kylo Ren in The Last Jedi: "MORE!" 

And more we got. Oh my goodness, seriously. We got so much spawning in May - so many individuals, in fact, that I lost a bet to Maikani over it. We had 14 individuals in a single night, 11 in another (and one night with just one individual...). We have so many observations of who spawned when and who was able to cross-fertilize whom that we filled 3 entire notebooks. I had packed two brand-new books for the trip, thinking there was no way in the world we'd fill both, and we had to go into town to buy an extra notebook. It was insane. 

May 2023 was our best month ever. Granted, the high level of activity made the end of the trip pretty chaotic, but it was so worth it. 

Porites lobata eggs. Photo by Maikani Andres.

So can our different lineages cross-fertilize one another? Unfortunately, I can't say for sure quite yet. We still don't know which lineage many of our parents belong to, so I'll have to figure that out this summer. We had genotyped a number of individuals from each of our study sites in 2021, but we also grabbed some unknowns this year to bolster our numbers - and of course the unknowns were the ones to give us the most gametes. Whatever. It will just take a little more lab work for me to figure out who's who. I'll dig into that over the next couple of months. There are definitely interesting patterns in the data, but I just can't draw any solid conclusions yet. 

I'm so glad we stayed and put in the effort for two spawning months this year. We have so much good data!