By perseverance

"By perseverance, the snail reached the Ark." 

- Charles Spurgeon

Leading a research lab is like trying to write a book in a tornado. Every day, I sit at my desk and put text on paper, hoping my words will compel a federal agency or a private foundation to grant us the money we need to keep going. Or I deal with finances, correspondence, and standardized forms - the hum-drum paperwork that for some reason the world requires. If I'm lucky, I get to write a paper reporting our scientific results. 

Meanwhile, my lab is a flurry of activity. An incessant clicking from the far corner indicates my technician, Sarah, is busy counting zooplankton. My postdoc, Johanna, paces around the molecular biology bench as she extracts and amplifies DNA from tiny larvae. New boxes of samples showed up in the freezer last night, indicating my PhD student, Kharis, is finally home from her own whirlwind research trip in the high Arctic. Multiple times per day, someone sticks their head into my office to announce a victory, share a struggle, or ask for advice. In the middle of it all, my phone chimes with text messages from Calvin, who is currently working remotely on his own complementary projects. 

Recently, Sarah has had a tornado of her own to deal with - or maybe this one is more of a tsunami. The poor girl is practically drowning in snails. 

An array of snail larvae in one zooplankton sample from Palau.
Photo by Sarah Zuidema.

My lab is currently collaborating on a project with the Palau International Coral Reef Center to characterize the zooplankton in Palau's EEZ. As you might remember, I've made several trips to Palau in the past few years for coral research. One of the scientists there was excited to learn that I had a background in deep-sea biology and experience identifying larvae. She asked if I could help analyze a set of zooplankton samples from Palau's large National Marine Sanctuary. Of course I agreed, and I brought the samples home with me from Palau last May. 

Sarah is now wading through the samples one by one, and she has discovered incredible biodiversity. I asked her to sort all the animals to morphotype - don't bother identifying them at first, just sort them into groups that look alike. So far, we're up to 374 morphotypes, and there is no end in sight. 

One of the most diverse groups is the snails. We have dozens of morphotypes of snails, all presumably either the larval forms of benthic species or pteropods that spend their whole life in the water. Johanna has started barcoding some of the morphotypes, and it actually looks like most species are benthic. Even morphotypes we originally labeled as pteropods are turning out to be larval limpets and whelks and periwinkles. I'm actually super excited to find such an incredible diversity of gastropod larvae offshore in the tropical Pacific. 

We have a lot of work ahead of us, that's for sure. I advised Sarah to take one snail at a time - you don't have to get through all of them, just one. And then another. And then another. By perseverance, we will get there. If Sarah is the snail crawling up the ramp to the Ark one inch at a time while the storm brews around her, I suppose I'm the captain, calling orders from the deck of the ship and furiously writing proposals to finance the expedition. 

By perseverance, we will get there.