Meyer-Kaiser lab

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 going to meas

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 just the segmented ma