Meyer-Kaiser lab

Evan Kovacs presenting ROV video footage from Portland The year was 1898. Just three days after Thanksgiving, New England would see the worst maritime disaster in the region's history. The passenger steamship Portland left Boston at 7 pm, bound for Portland, Maine. Meanwhile, the storm of two centuries swept up the North American coast, claiming shipwrecks in her wake. The Portland sailed straight into the storm, and none of the approximately 200 people on board survived.  It's been 125 years since 1898 - well, 2023 was. Last October, my collaborators at Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary planned an event to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the sinking of the Portland . Unforeseen circumstances forced us to reschedule, but we were finally able to hold the event last weekend! Terry Wolkowicz from Sound Explorations sharing her music-based educational creation about Portland 's  biological community.  https://vimeo.com/842533494 We gathered in Portland, Maine, ...

I had exactly one free day between the end of the Ocean Outlook conference and my flight home. How I was going to spend it was never in question. When you have a free day in Norway, you go on a hike.  Some of Ulriken's 1333 stairs. There's a mountain right outside of Bergen called Ulriken, which is a super common hike for locals and tourists alike. You can take a cable car to the top, or you can hike it. If you're crazy, you can jog up Ulriken, and the internet warned me I would see some locals doing so. It was not an exaggeration. I got passed by so many people running up the mountain. Norwegians are insane.  My plan was to summit Ulriken, then follow the trail across to Bergen's other (smaller) mountain peak, Fløyen. Based on information online, it seemed like it should take me 1 hour to reach the summit and another 4 hours to hike across. That's exactly the length of hike I was looking for, so I packed my bag and set off.  When you start up Ulriken, you have a f...

Way back in the day, as the story goes, a WHOI scientist got approached by a scientist from the University of Bergen. The Bergen scientist was looking for advice on a particular topic that the WHOI scientist was an expert in, so they started talking. The more the conversation went on, the more they realized how much their research, their institutions, and even their towns had in common. Both Woods Hole and Bergen have multiple research institutions all focused on the ocean. A lot of the research in both cities focuses on the North Atlantic, including environmental impacts of things like climate change and pollutants. The two scientists - one American, one Norwegian - decided that researchers in their respective cities should get together once a year to discuss their shared interests in a conference, and Ocean Outlook was born.  The conference took a break during covid (like everything else), but thanks to our Norwegian friends, Ocean Outlook is back at it this year! I was very exci...

The timing for this trip could not have been more perfect. Recently, my student, Kharis, has been working to identify small larvae collected on two expeditions in the Fram Strait. She's had her fair share of struggles with the process, including the realization that specimens she labeled as the same morphotype in the field are actually multiple different species. We're making it through the dataset - slowly. A challenge that's come up recently is that a number of her morphotypes don't match to any species in a public database. Our sequences are clean - but nobody has sequenced that particular species before. We have perfect data and no match. It's incredibly frustrating.  One particularly challenging group is the polychaetes , or segmented worms. Not many people in the world care about polychaetes (trust me, they should care ), so it's an understudied group. Kharis asked a colleague for advice on who might have a lot of polychaete sequences we could use as a...

A cute harbor in Bergen. Yes, the guys on the bottom left are about to jump into the water.  The Norwegian Parliament just authorized a new area for seafloor mining.  These protest posters were visible all over town. I was waiting for the aquarium to open when this adorable, well-cared-for cat approached me. I reached out my hand to pet him, and 2 seconds later, he climbed up my arm onto my backpack. For a few minutes, I was stuck there, not wanting to move and disturb the resting feline. Pretty soon, some school groups started showing up, and kids were asking if they could pet him. I had to find the words in Norwegian to explain that this is not my cat.  Sea lions at the Bergen Aquarium Seen in Bergen's city center Colorful row houses in Bergen's city center

Years ago, when I was still a graduate student, I had a conversation with one of my mentors about burnout. He dutifully encouraged me to have a healthy work-life balance, take vacations, live my life, and all that good stuff. Then he turned the question on me: "What do you do to combat burnout?"  I thought for a second and then answered as honestly as I could: "I move to Europe."  It's true. After an intense undergraduate experience, I knew I needed a break and moved to Germany. That year ended up being the most significant experience of my life to that point. I delved deeply into German culture, explored a new field of research, and returned to the States a different person. A few years later, when I was on the brink of burnout in grad school, I took a fellowship in Norway . The 6 months I spent in Stavanger refreshed me , calmed me, connected me with a community , and forever transformed the way I approach science. Not only have my two long-term European expe...

A hydromedusa (top), cerinula larva (middle), and claim (bottom). Photos by Declan Lane. Recently, two of my high school interns asked for a lesson. We have been working for months on sorting plankton from the Arctic, but all these samples are preserved in ethanol. They don't move. They just hang there in the liquid, begging to be sorted. My interns wondered what it was like to sort live plankton instead.  Of course I was happy to show them. We grabbed a plankton net from my lab, dragged it through the water off the dock in Eel Pond, and looked at the sample together under the microscopes. It is so satisfying for me to  introduce new  students to science - I love guiding their curiosity, listening to their exclamations, and showing them the incredible diversity in the ocean.  The sample we collected happened to be full of medusae. If you've heard the word "medusa" before, it was probably in context of Greek mythology, but the woman with snakes for hair is not wha...

A 360-degree sunset in mid-afternoon. Photo by Angela Meyer. If you have been anywhere in North America this week, you heard about the solar eclipse. Hotel rooms and Airbnbs in the path of totality were booked to capacity. Eclipse glasses were a hot commodity. Crowds gathered in parks yesterday afternoon for "watch parties." The only way to not hear about the solar eclipse was to hide under a rock.  For those experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime event, I get it. A solar eclipse is a big deal. Here in Woods Hole, we had 91% occlusion, which was pretty impressive. Ambient light was certainly dimmer than I would have expected for 3 pm. It was strange to step outside yesterday and feel the cool air in mid-afternoon. What's even stranger is that this is my third solar eclipse in 4 years - I've seen partial eclipses during field work in the high Arctic and Palau . I'll add this one to the list.  Total solar eclipse. Photo by Angela Meyer. My parents were in the path of t...

I donned my nitrile gloves, wiped down the lab bench with ethanol, and opened my freezer. One hundred and eighty coral samples stared me in the face. Each one rested quietly in its small ethanol tube. They had no idea what was about to happen to them, but I did. The battle belonged to me. Friends, I have spent a lot of time extracting DNA from Porites lobata . I mean, a lot of time. So much time. I started with a round of 90 samples in 2019 . That was followed by another round of 90 in late 2021 . Don't forget about the 150 samples I did in 2022 , either. I couldn't even tell you at this point how much time I've spent extracting DNA. The process is pretty repetitive, to the point that I treat it like a form of meditation .  Take a wild guess what I've been doing this week. Yep, extracting DNA from Porites lobata . This time, the corals in my dataset are parents that contributed offspring to our experiments last spring. We did a ton of experiments - to the point that it...