Million dollar babies

"It's the magic of risking everything for a dream that nobody sees but you." 

- the movie Million Dollar Baby

Matt and Cas searching for survivors. Photo
by Maikani Andres.

I was in my dive gear, floating on the surface of the sea. The teal blue water was completely still. The boat's engines were turned off. Birdsong wafted in from the surrounding jungle, but all the humans were silent. A few feet away from me, Maikani drifted wordlessly in the water. Cas sat on the boat, almost as still as a statue with a tube of ethanol in his hand. Matthew hunched over a microscope and only moved to adjust the focus. You could feel the tension in the thick, humid air. 

"Oh, hello," Matthew broke the silence with a friendly greeting, as if he were addressing a child. "There you are," he continued. With one hand, he unwrapped a razor blade while keeping his focus down the tube of the microscope. He brought the razor blade near the limestone tile he was looking at, dug a sharp corner into the surface, and then sucked up the fragments he had just broken loose. Diligently, Cas opened the ethanol tube in his hand to receive the sample. About 20 minutes of searching were concluded with the discovery of that one little coral, and we were nowhere close to finished. 

It took us the entire day. One by one, each tile that we had transplanted was brought to the surface. Square inch by square inch, the tile was searched under a microscope for any surviving juvenile corals. Painstakingly, each individual was sampled. 

A cluster of surviving corals at 50x magnification.

It was...cathartic. That's the only word I can find to describe it. So much effort and so much planning went into this experiment. It's the experiment that convinced the National Science Foundation to fund our project, but it has been difficult every step of the way. Our first attempt last year epically failed. Along the way, we've learned everything we could about reproduction in Porites lobata, and then this year, we thought very carefully about how to position the tiles so at least some corals would survive. To cap it off, we brought a freaking microscope on a dive boat! 

But it worked. Friends, the experiment worked! We had juvenile corals survive on tiles at both sites, and we sampled most of them within a few minutes of collection. That means we can look at their DNA, their gene expression, their symbionts, and their microbial communities. We will have so much data!

Those little baby corals are so precious to me. I cannot wait to dig into the data when I get home.