Meyer-Kaiser lab

DeepZoo in a test tank at AVAST. Photo by Johanna Weston. I love seeing members of my lab succeed . Johanna, my postdoc, has recently been working at WHOI's engineering hub, AVAST, to finalize her full-ocean-depth zooplankton sampler. She calls it DeepZoo . This week, DeepZoo had a major milestone: the first in-water test! Johanna sent an update to every member of the lab, complete with a photo of DeepZoo in action. "DeepZoo's first full working dunk," she wrote. "Over 10 minutes, it logged data and battery voltage, opened the door, spun the thruster, closed the door, and stopped log...Feels like I just hit a view after a lot of switchbacks."  I am proud of Johanna's accomplishment. DeepZoo started as an idea, but she has turned the sampler into a reality. What's more, the relatively small sampler pumps an immense amount of water. With it, Johanna should be able to collect new specimens from the deep sea - she even has an opportunity to do so coming...

Years ago, I vented to my husband, Carl , about a project that I had wanted to do but couldn't get funded. The proposal fell through at the last minute, and I was sad. Now, Carl is 8 years older than me and has plenty of life experience to show for it. He has been not just a partner but also a guide and a sounding board for me over the years. When I expressed my frustration over the failed proposal, he just shrugged.  "It's a funnel," he said. A career in academia means constantly watching your work get filtered, sifted, and funneled, until only the your very best work remains. You have 100 ideas, but only 50 of them turn into actual proposals. Of those 50, statistically speaking, only about 5 will get funded. Based on my experience , only one will work how it's supposed to, but if you're lucky, you can squeak out a few published papers anyway. It's a funnel. I'm right in the middle of the funnel right now. This week, I have worked on 3 different pro...

Sarah's work station at WHOI, where she has sorted thousands of animals so far. Here, she's neck-deep in local polychaetes.  My technician, Sarah, is amazing . I lean on her heavily. Sarah can handle herself with very little direction when I assign her a project. She's highly detail-oriented, so I know she won't miss a single thing. Most of the time, I hand her a set of samples and walk away - she's got it. And I can trust that she will reach out when she needs help.  This week, Sarah asked for help with some samples. She has been cranking away, sorting and identifying animals from Vineyard Sound  for a project we're doing with a local consulting company . We touch base regularly to identify any tricky species together. But the tricky ones have piled up. Sarah was feeling behind. She asked for two focused days on the microscope with me, so I kept my schedule as clear as possible and joined her in the lab.  One of the bivalves in our samples Sarah came to our me...

Friends, today another paper from my Palau coral project is out! The postdoc on the project, Cas, led an analysis of how different corals respond to high temperatures. You probably remember that we found 3 cryptic lineages of Porites corals at our study sites. Cas wanted to find out how those lineages differ and how each one handles the environmental conditions they live in. As it turns out, each lineage has a different strategy - and it's not just the corals themselves. The algal symbionts and microbial communities that live inside them contribute to thermal tolerance, too. It's a long, detailed paper. You can read our work here in Global Change Biology :  https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gcb.17578

I have big plans for Hollis . And he has big plans for himself. One of the first things he told me when we first met is that he is college-bound. No questions. No second thoughts. He is going to college. Alright, dude, let's get you into college.  We spent all last year sorting larvae from Arctic zooplankton samples. There are still more samples to go through, but I didn't want Hollis to spend a second year sitting at a microscope - he already knows how to sort larvae. It's time to expand his range of skills. When we started mentorship this year, I told Hollis about some of the lab techniques I wanted to introduce him to. I had barely finished saying the words "DNA extraction" before he squealed in delight.  The scallop project we're working on right now provides an excellent opportunity to introduce Hollis to molecular biology techniques. We've separated all the bivalve larvae from the samples, but we have to verify that the larvae we're looking at...

For a while now, I have mentored an intern named Hollis . He was matched with me through a mentorship program at his school and stayed on as a volunteer over the summer. We're now in the second year of mentorship, and Hollis and I are already scheming about ways to keep working together long-term. He's still in high school, but he's already becoming a full-fledged member of the team.  Hollis spent most of last year helping to sort larvae from the high Arctic, but this year, I wanted to introduce him to new techniques. We're working together on an analysis of scallop larvae from Georges Bank. The task sounds simple: count how many scallop larvae are in my samples from each station. But that is easier said than done.  The samples are thick . Scallop larvae are tiny, so I had to use a super fine mesh net to collect them. So fine, in fact, that the net didn't just catch the larvae - it caught all the diatoms that were in the water, too. We're basically hunting fo...

Holding onto the rail with one elbow, I fished through my backpack with my other hand. It had to be in there somewhere. My fingertips registered the plastic texture, and my hand wrapped around the rectangular shape. There it was: my card for the Washington DC Metro. Just in time. I smiled. That little plastic card with $3 left on it has lived in my backpack since 2019 . It's about time I used it again.  I stepped off of the airport tram and scanned the overhead signs for my train.  My Marine Debris project is one of many funded recently by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. That means I am now part of a national community of concerned investigators trying to remove trash from our oceans. NOAA SeaGrant, the federal agency that funded my proposal, has organized a series of meetings to connect us with each other. Once per year, I will travel to NOAA headquarters in Silver Spring, MD to update the community about my team's work.  This was my first marine debris symposium, an...

Some images from Calvin's seminar, including sites he has studied. In his own words, "I study failures." Friends, as many of you know, I collaborate closely with a maritime archaeologist, Dr. Calvin Mires . The marine debris project that we just got funded will support Calvin for 3 years, and we both see that time as an opportunity. Over the next 3 years, Calvin will hopefully become much more integrated in WHOI research and develop new collaborations and projects. Calvin's been a WHOI employee since 2019, but since he's worked part-time and primarily remotely, not many people have met him in-person. The marine debris project will change all that.  The first step in introducing Calvin to the broader WHOI community was to schedule a seminar. The Biology department weekly seminar series is a platform for scientists in the department to discuss their research, answer questions, and build relationships. I just so happen to be one of the co-coordinators for the semina...

Sabine was my intern in 2017. She had just finished high school. I was about a year into my postdoc. A few times a week, we sat next to each other at the lab bench. She sorted larvae; I worked on whatever needed doing. She asked questions; I answered them. The data she generated were included in a paper I published a few years later.  We've sporadically kept in touch ever since, mostly through email and Christmas cards. When Sabine sent me a message that she was going to be in Woods Hole, it was a welcome surprise.  Dropping Sabine off at R/V Atlantic Explorer - the calm  before the crazy busy expedition! She's a PhD student now. This bit of news was exciting for me to find out - not only has Sabine stayed in marine science, she's pursuing research at the highest level of academia. I'm delighted to think that her chosen career will bring Sabine across my path repeatedly over the next few years.  We met at my house for dinner, and it was so good to catch up with Sabi...

Kharis with her opening slide I once signed an email to my lab as "Your Cheerleader in Chief." Let's be honest: that is one of the ways I view myself. A big part of my job is mentoring, and to me, mentoring sometimes means cheering from the sidelines when my lab members succeed. I am with them in the struggles, and I am with them in the victories. I love the days when I get to be a cheerleader.  Recently, I got to cheer on my PhD student, Kharis. She is currently about a year out from the end of her PhD program, and that meant she was due to give a seminar. PhD students in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program present part of their dissertation research in their final year, mostly as a means to gain experience discussing their research in a public context. The seminar also reduces the amount of material they'll have to cover during their hour-long defense and lets the department know what the student has been up to.  I know I'm biased, but Kharis rocked it. I was very proud ...

"White blob" in all its blob-ish glory It's always a good day when data land in my inbox. Recently, I have been working to identify larvae and juvenile invertebrates that I collected on R/V Polarstern earlier this year. Some of you might remember that I used a fine mesh net on an epibenthic sledge to collect larvae in the Arctic deep sea. I also had the opportunity to collect larval traps I had left on the seafloor 5 years earlier. Needless to say, identifying larvae from the Arctic deep sea is a challenge. DNA sequencing is absolutely necessary for identifications. So when the sequences show up in my email, I get excited.  My lab has refined a great protocol for DNA extraction and amplification for single larvae. It's working reliably now, even for some challenging specimens . This week, I was delighted to get successful sequences from my Polarstern samples.  There were some surprises, to be sure. The biggest surprise was from a specimen I had named "white ...

Friends, I have good news! Team Porites has published our research on spawning, larval development, and settlement of massive Porites corals in Palau.  In 2022 and 2023, I led a field team studying reproduction in Porites corals  - when they spawn, how big their eggs are, how the larvae develop, when and where they settle. This work involved a lot of late nights , a lot of patience , and a lot of diligent note-taking . Our study was largely observational, but it's still incredibly valuable information for anyone working on mounding Porites .  You can read the full paper in Invertebrate Biology :  https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ivb.12447

It is autumn in New England. Hurricanes sweep through the North Atlantic. The wind speed along the beach is swifter than ever. The surface of the ocean is disrupted by white-capped waves. The weather is anything but pleasant.  F/V Kristen S. in port in New Bedford So if a scientist needed samples from, say, Georges Bank, they would be completely dependent on the weather forecast. When a window of calm seas opened up, they might even drop everything and dash to New Bedford to hop on a fishing boat. That, my friends, is exactly what I did.  You might remember I have a project right now on Atlantic sea scallops, Placopecten magellanicus . I went out on a fishing boat over the summer to collect data on scallop density, water temperature, food supply, and predator abundance at stations on Georges Bank. Out of all the parameters we measured (and tasty scallops we were allowed to keep), there was one piece missing: scallop larvae. You see, scallops spawn in the fall. If I was goin...

The jaws of this polychaete now  fill Sarah's nightmares. Photo by  Sarah Zuidema. Back when I was in grad school, I spent 2 weeks on a ship in the Arctic. It was part of a class I was taking on polar benthic ecology. The expedition gave me a great opportunity to collect panels that I had deployed about a year prior and actually generated data that turned into one of my dissertation chapters . Aside from my personal research, though, the class itself was incredibly valuable. Most of the time at sea was spent collecting and sorting  seafloor samples from different Svalbard fjords. Sorting seafloor samples means identifying lots of worms. So basically, I spent 2 weeks at sea identifying worms.  Boy am I glad that I did.  There are an unbelievable number of worms in the ocean. According to the World Register of Marine Species, there are 12,834 valid species of polychaetes globally. (There's even a species of  polychaete named after me .) And polychaetes are ...

The ROV we used to record video today I was on a Zoom call about my offshore wind project  when one of the consultants brought up a familiar name: Marine Imaging Technologies. The small Massachusetts-based company had been sub-contracted to collect video data using a remotely operated vehicle. As the benthic ecology expert on the project, I was responsible for ensuring the video recordings were high quality and clearly showed the seafloor community. I needed to join Marine Imaging staff for a day at sea.  I gave a wide smile. I was about to get paid to spend a day on a boat with my friends. Marine Imaging Technologies owner, Evan, and his deputy, David, were key players in our 2019-2020 Stellwagen Telepresence Project , and we collaborated on a project in the Gulf of Mexico in 2022, too. When I stepped onto R/V  Catapult  at 6:30 am, both Evan and David greeted me with warm hugs. The last time I saw them was in April in Portland, Maine, for a public event celebr...

It has been a big week for the Meyer-Kaiser lab. My anemone experiment is going swimmingly (pun intended!); Kharis recovered CATAIN successfully in the Arctic; and Johanna has made incredible progress on DeepZoo .  Johanna sent me this photo to celebrate that DeepZoo's housing passed its pressure test! Most of the DeepZoo work happens at WHOI's AVAST engineering hub, so I'm not there in person to see every step. I learn of Johanna's victories through her joyful texts and videos she sends at key moments. This week, she had two to share. First, the titanium housing that holds DeepZoo's electronics passed its pressure test! This is actually a pretty big deal, because the housing has to withstand 1100 atmospheres of pressure. DeepZoo was designed to work at all ocean depths - right down to the deepest point, the Challenger Deep. The custom full-ocean-depth housing was machined out of titanium. It's incredibly precise work, not to mention that the housing has three...

Our Oktoberfest outfits! A little over a year ago, my husband, Carl, and I visited Colorado. Carl spent some of his childhood in Colorado; he studied at Colorado State University, and his first job was in Colorado Springs. His parents live outside of Denver, and many of his college and grad school-era friends are still in Fort Collins. We had a busy visiting schedule that trip, but one moment in particular stood out to me. Carl's best friend from college threw a barbecue in Carl's honor, and about 20 people showed up. It was magnificent. Most of the friends Carl left behind when he moved Massachusetts are still in contact with one another, and in fact, the circle has grown over time. They brought their kids. They hugged us, but they were also happy to see each other. That night in Fort Collins was a beautiful expression of community.  We came back home after that trip with a question: "How can we create a stronger sense of community on Cape Cod?" I spent a lot of time...

"Be the kind of woman who, when your feet hit the floor each morning, the devil says 'Oh no! She's up!'" - Joanne Clancy My alarm went off at 7, like usual. As I picked up my phone to silence it, I noticed a text message from Kharis, my PhD student: "She's up!" I sank back into the pillows and let out a deep breath. Wonderful. She's up. Thank goodness.  "She" in this context is CATAIN , the camera system that my lab invented a few years ago. CATAIN is specifically designed to capture settlement - the process of a larva metamorphosing and attaching to its new juvenile habitat on the seafloor. A lot of animals die right after they settle, so it's really difficult to study settlement itself. Most of the time, researchers leave out fouling panels and then collect them with all the attached animals a few months later. The problem with that strategy, though, is you only see the sum total of everything that settled and everything that die...

Settled larvae in my culture dishes I sat down at the microscope with a dish of anemone larvae in one hand and a glass pipet in the other. Time for a water change. For about a week and a half, I had been tracking everything I could about my Metridium senile larvae - size, shape, buoyancy, swimming speed, survival. All those parameters would inform a high-resolution model of their dispersal, so I needed to record everything.  Peering into one of my dishes, I noticed something I hadn't seen before: small blobs attached to the glass. They were about the size and shape of a larva, actually. Same color, too. I sucked up a little water with my pipet and blew it on one of the blobs. The blob did not move. It was firmly attached to the dish.  Zooming in, I noticed that the blobs had a bit of internal structure. A central point, some pale lines radiating out from it. A mouth and septa. Just like a juvenile anemone.  Ladies and gentlemen, we have settlement! Those blobs can only b...

Two project team members bringing the grab  on board Tioga , hopefully with a good sample! As a benthic ecologist, I've taken plenty of grab samples in my day. It's pretty much a staple of the field. You lower a grab over the side of a boat, scoop up some sediment, sieve it, and preserve the animals. Every benthic ecologist knows how to collect a good grab sample. I can't even tell you how time I've spent sieving sediment samples in the field. The whole process is second nature by now.  As you might guess, grab sampling is not second nature for everyone. Recently, I had the opportunity to bring others up to speed when a local consulting company asked me to partner with them. I joined the team on WHOI's boat, R/V Tioga , as the resident expert on benthic ecology.  It was a fun trip. Two of the consultants deployed and recovered the grab - they didn't need me for that part. But once the sampler was on deck, I had to check it. Ideally, you want a grab that fills t...

A Metridium senile larva I pulled into the parking lot at work. It was 6:30 am. Every morning, I stopped by the lab before my safety training class to take care of my larvae. Every afternoon, I went straight back to the lab as soon as my training was finished. Sure, I was burning the candle at both ends, but I was getting amazing data.  I have wanted to study the larvae of Metridium senile for several years now. I actually had a lightbulb moment in 2017, when my husband dragged me to a dive show north of Boston. We had just started dating, and he wanted to get me interested in SCUBA diving (the plan may have worked a   little too well ). There was an exhibit at the dive show about the shipwreck Andria Doria , which rests just south of Nantucket. As we walked through the exhibit, I stopped short. Every photo of the shipwreck on display that day had the same species in it: Metridium senile . I new Metridium well - it was the dominant species on a shipwreck I studied in grad...

I stood in the hallway of an academic building at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Sunlight filled the cathedral-like hall and glistened on the waters of the Cape Cod Canal just outside the windows behind me. Like all academic buildings, this one held classrooms and labs behind numbered doors. But education at Mass Maritime goes beyond topics you can learn at a desk. Large glass doors to my left were labeled "Diesel Engine Lab." Students wearing zip-up, grease-stained jump suits and hard hats filed in for their class. They gathered around a giant, hulking piece of metal - a diesel engine, probably from a ship. I guess if you're going to fix them for your career, you have to learn on the real thing.  Out in the hallway, I was wearing my standard work-casual outfit: leggings and a fleece. But over top, I had a full-body harness, work gloves, a hard hat, and protective eyewear. My feet were clad in steel-toe shoes. Twin lanyards with quick-release hooks dangled from my hi...

I got to the lab at 6:30 am. I was due at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy for all-day safety training starting at 8, so I wanted to check on my fluffy anemones beforehand. Just to make sure they weren't spawning, you know? Over the past few weeks, I had tried light shock, heat shock, cold shock, combination light-heat shock, and just standing over them, staring them down. Nothing seemed to work. They probably weren't going to spawn for me. I pretty much knew it was going to be a useless trip. But the literature said spawning can happen spontaneously right after dawn, so I had to check. Just to be sure.  You can probably tell where this is going.  Yep, I had sperm in one bin and eggs in another - from two different females, even! All three spawning individuals were different colors, too! That meant I had gametes from a cross-section of the population. Amazing!  Metridium senile eggs (and one dividing embryo!) I looked at my watch. 6:45 am. I was due in Bourne at 8:00,...