The ocean was wrong: part 2

Back in grad school, I told my advisor that the ocean was like a mob boss. We started having equipment failures at sea after a few successful rounds of data collection, so my theory was that we were getting too close. The ocean did not want to give up her secrets, so she messed with our equipment behind our backs. We were too good; we had to be stopped. My advisor's response was simple: the ocean was wrong. 

I don't think coral reefs are like a mob boss. They don't sneak in the dark of night and tamper with your equipment when it's kilometers away from you. That's the deep-sea's MO. Coral reefs are much more blatant, open, dramatic. They fight you in the light of day, with exceptional flair. Like a professional wrestler. You know, one in colorful tights with a comedic stage name. Hear me out: waves toss you around like a balloon in the wind. Sharp rocks and shells pose dangers at every turn. One wrong move, and you get stung, scraped, or poisoned. Honestly, in that environment, getting hit over the head with a chair would not seem out of the ordinary. 

But against all of that, my team succeeded. Wildly. We are going home with three notebooks worth of observations, 463 samples, and I don't even know how many photos. We won. It took a coordinated team effort, but we have defeated the wrestler in two successive monthly rounds. 

This trip, my team: 

- made 56 unique observations of coral individuals spawning

- cryopreserved coral sperm

- crossed gametes from our spawners to figure out which ones are compatible

- used successful crosses in a larval heat stress experiment 

- reared larvae in batch crosses

- settled larvae on limestone tiles and glass slides

- used settlers in a post-settlement survival experiment

- deployed the limestone tiles in a transplant experiment

- actually recovered some survivors from the transplant experiment

- forced some larvae to keep swimming so we could determine their pelagic larval duration

- used those delayed-metamorphosis larvae in an experiment looking at carryover effects

- collected and analyzed limestone recruitment tiles

- collected photos of coral babies out on the reef

- collected georeferenced samples to tell if our coral lineages are unevenly distributed

- finished our nubbin transplant experiment from last year

- tested the thermal tolerance in two sister species

- shared our research with the public

Team Porites hard at work. Photo by Cas Grupstra.

Honestly, that is a dizzying list. We are positively swimming in data. 

Unfortunately, the one thing I don't have from this trip is a good picture of all four of us. We went to a relatively fancy restaurant on our last night in Palau, so I should have taken one then. I guess fancy-restaurant vibes were not the theme of the trip, though. We were much more often salty, sweaty, and in swimwear. That's what you see in the photo I've chosen here. Cas is behind the camera, and you can see me, Maikani, and Matthew working diligently side-by-side. This is how we spent most of the trip: together. It's why we succeeded. For 45 straight days, we supported each other and worked as a team. And we won.