Meyer-Kaiser lab

Never before in my life have I worn mascara and a hard hat for the same event.  On the bow of SSUS in Mobile. Photo by Dave Clark.  Friends, I am in Mobile, AL, where the iconic passenger liner, SS United States , is being readied to become the world's largest artificial reef. I am the leader of a scientific team that will establish the baseline physical, chemical, and biological condition of the ship as soon as it reaches the seafloor, then return every year to monitor how it changes. By tracking changes to the habitat (i.e., the ship) and the biological community over time, we can answer fundamental biological questions and understand how anthropogenic habitats impact the ocean. I am beyond excited for the research we will do.  A few months ago, a film producer got in contact with my team at WHOI. He was looking to make an IMAX film about shipwrecks and wanted to feature SS United States . We had a few Zoom conversations to iron out details and connect the producer with...

Every year, sometime around September, I cross a mental threshold. My brain switches into Paper Mode. After spending most of my year on field work, proposal writing, and mentorship, I realize that I have not submitted any papers for the year. That is absolutely unacceptable to my achievement-driven personality, so I ignore my email, crunch through my data, and bang out all my manuscripts for the year. By December, my annual crop of papers is with my co-authors for comment or even submitted for publication. This year, my crop is higher than usual. Instead of my average 3 papers, I have 6 ready to submit. I'm actually surprised at myself - I have done a lot this year. I'm pretty excited about the papers I've written this year, so I'd like to tell you about each of them.  1) The Fram larvae paper - this is one of Kharis's thesis chapters. She did the actual writing, but I'm counting it in my "crop" of papers for the year because I supervised and advised h...

Dr. Meyer-Kaiser and Dr. Schrage "Grad students are like pancakes: the first one always comes out a little funky." - just a thing that academics say to each other Ladies and gentleman, I have incredible news: my very first PhD student, Kharis Schrage, has graduated! Last week, Kharis successfully defended her dissertation and completed the MIT-WHOI Joint Program. She has earned the title of Dr. Schrage.  I am immensely proud of Kharis. She joined my lab in the summer of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, when all field work was stalled and nobody know where the world was headed. Kharis wanted to focus her dissertation on the Arctic ecosystem, so she asked me to estimate the probability that I could get her to the Arctic within the 5-year program. I estimated 95%. In the end, Kharis made 5 trips to the Arctic during her PhD, including a few without me. She collected enough samples to fill an entire shelf of our lab freezer and enough data to fill its own hard drive. She prod...

With my husband, Carl, on a deco stop in Bonaire. Photo by Megan Applegate .  "I am currently on vacation in my natural habitat - underwater on a rebreather." - my automatic email responder over the past couple weeks About 2000 miles due south of my home in Massachusetts, there is a small desert island. The dry landscape is inhabited by tall cacti , feral donkeys , and blue-tailed lizards. Below water, the biodiversity is much greater - corals and snails and fishes abound. Historical relics of harsher times are visible above and below the waves, but now, the island's economy depends on tourism. This seemingly make-believe place is called Bonaire.  I've been to Bonaire several times, always for dive vacations. This year, my 2-week trip served a dual purpose. As a vacation, it allowed me time away from normal routines to reset and decompress. As a dive trip, it reinforced my technical diving skills and got me back up-to-date for scientific work underwater.  Showing ...

Friends, November is off to a very exciting start for my lab! A while ago, I was contacted by a reporter from CNN, Katie Hunt, who was curious about our eDNA project . You know the one I'm talking about - the pilot study my lab conducted to determine whether DNA collected from the environment could be used to locate human remains at archaeological sites. The study was a partnership with DPAA, a branch of the US Department of Defense that is responsible for locating, excavating, and repatriating the remains of all fallen US service members. They have thousands of open cases and were looking to speed up their process to provide closure to more families. My lab is one of the few in the country with equal expertise in archaeology and biology , so DPAA reached out to us. By sampling at sites with ongoing excavations, we were able to directly correlate eDNA results with findings of each excavation. That way, we could ground-truth whether eDNA was an effective methodology for locating hu...

The bow model. Photo by Terry Wolkowicz. Friends, there has been a very exciting development in my marine debris project . One of our main objectives was development of an interactive museum exhibit that teaches the public about the importance of shipwrecks to the marine habitat and the damage done to them by entangled fishing gear. And we have done it! All parts of the exhibit are finished, and two sections of our exhibit have already gotten public exposure! A key piece of our exhibit is a model of steamship Portland ’s bow , which became entangled with a trawl net between 2009 and 2019. Sculpted models of key species living on Portland show how the shipwreck provides habitat for marine species. You might remember that a few years ago, my lab collaborated with Sound Explorations to tell the tale of Portland and its biological community through music . We extended that collaboration for the exhibit – visitors can build their own musical chords to represent the communi...

A few months ago, I was chatting with a WHOI postdoc, Carolin. She casually mentioned that she had an idea for an experiment using coral larvae, but because no reef-building corals live in Massachusetts, she was going to do the experiment with oysters instead. Oysters are a poor analogue for corals - in fact, they're hardly comparable at all - but she felt it was her only option.  "What about anemone larvae?" I asked. Anemones should be very comparable to corals - both are cnidarians, so they have the same larval form, a planula.  VibrioBOD set up in a lab at WHOI "Well, that would be great," Carolin responded, "but where could I get anemone larvae?"  "From me," I answered. Her face lit up, and a collaboration was born.  The driving question for Carolin's experiment is "How do marine larvae react to sound?" A lot of experiments have addressed how adult animals react to sound - and in most cases the reaction is negative. Scallops...

"Sold out." The phrase kept ringing in my mind as I watched people enter Redfield Auditorium. Enough guests had registered to fill every single seat. I had never given a presentation to a sold-out crowd, but then again, I had never been billed as a VIP speaker alongside Brian Skerry and Sylvia Earle. I asked WHOI's Advancement team if they were sure of their choice. They were. So I took a deep breath and watched WHOI supporters file into the auditorium one by one.  Delivering my presentation in Redfield Auditorium. Photo by Katherine Joyce. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has launched a monumental effort: the largest campaign in history to support ocean science. As a not-for-profit institution, we are dependent on grants, contracts, and philanthropic gifts to continue doing what we do best. Federal funding for research has declined in recent years and is likely to face further cuts in the near future. Yet, we are in a critical time for ocean research, as the environ...

One-on-one lecture! Learning from Calvin was so fun. I met Calvin at Bridgewater State University. He held a spot for me in the parking lot and then showed me up to his classroom in the Anthropology building. He had just finished delivering his lecture on Myth and Culture to a room of bored undergraduates, and he was ready for a different kind of student. I laid down the armful of textbooks Calvin had loaned me the week before, took a seat in the front row, and pulled out my notebook.  Calvin wrote on the white board the title of today's class: Archaeology for Kirstin. By mutual agreement, we were both taking this lecture very seriously.  Calvin has wanted to teach me the craft of archaeology in detail for several years now. We've had small lessons - how to map a site , the parts of a ship, what is site formation . But most of those lessons were procedural. We were co-designing studies and discussing how to collect our data in the field, not the broader questions behind our pu...

We were three hours outside the port of New Bedford, MA, before I thought of it. I stepped up the stairs to the wheelhouse and got the captain's attention.  "Hi! Um, what's the bathroom situation on board?" I asked.  "Oh!" he jumped up, stepped away from the pilot's chair, and strode out onto the deck.  I followed the captain outside and watched with curiosity. First, he grabbed a 5-gallon bucket and filled it partway with seawater from a hose. Just inside the open engine room door, he set the bucket down, grabbed something off the wall rack of tools, and laid it on top of the bucket. He seemed to be digging for something else in the pile of jackets and boots. I walked slowly toward the engine room as my curiosity morphed into horror. The bucket had a toilet seat on it. The captain found what he was looking for - a roll of toilet paper - and hung it on the tool rack on the wall.  He gestured toward the engine room door. "You can close this..." ...

Friends, I am excited to tell you about another publication from my lab! This one has been a long time coming. Back in 2021, a collaborator from the Alfred Wegener Institute approached me on Polarstern and asked if I would be willing to take on a project. I had analyzed photos of the seafloor from one of the HAUSGARTEN stations when I lived in Germany (2011-2012), and more photos were collected from the same station in the years since. Could I analyze the new images and continue the time-series, my colleague asked. I was already familiar with the station and the best person to track how it had changed over time.  I accepted my collaborator's calling - and I even used the project as an opportunity to train a student of my own! My 2022 Summer Student Fellow, Kimberly , marked all the animals in seafloor images, and I double-checked her work. We made it through two of the sampling years over that summer, and then Kimberly did two more as part of her undergraduate thesis. She ran sta...

I am getting pretty darn familiar with what Woods Hole looks like at 6:30 am. That's the time I've been getting to work each day since collecting my anemones . Last year, the anemones spawned on September 5 and 10, giving me enough eggs and sperm for a great experiment. I reared the little larvae to settlement and collected a ton of data. This year, I've been monitoring them daily since August 30. And I haven't gotten anything.  Why haven't the anemones spawned yet? Your guess is as good as mine. Marine animals can be very particular.  Kharis's white board. Believe it or not, this passes for order in my lab. In the meantime, order is being restored to my lab. My grad student, Kharis, took a big step recently by ordering the results for her fourth and final dissertation chapter. It has been exciting to see the story take shape.  Kharis's fourth chapter uses data from CATAIN , the camera system we invented to study settlement and post-settlement mortality i...

"Happiness [is] a byproduct of a well-ordered life."  - the TV show The Gilded Age If the quote above is to be believed, I should be miserable right now. My house is absolute mayhem, and my lab is no better. I left town in an absolute flurry at the end of July, and my collateral chaos has sat in place ever since. On top of that mess are boxes of gear I brought home from the Solomon Islands , packages I should have shipped before I left, packages that arrived while I was away, and the usual array of dog toys and bones. Mayhem .  You might be wondering why I only posted once in August. Last time you heard from me, I was in the Solomon Islands, waiting to board a research ship. I had an amazing two weeks on board diving, collecting data, and doing the type of research I have wanted to do for years. I would have loved to tell you all about it. Unfortunately, the sites we were working on were incredibly sensitive, so the chief scientist asked me to refrain from posting. The disco...

In every spy movie, there is a scene where the protagonist is in a foreign city. They sip coffee from an apartment window while watching the city below. The windows are open for ventilation but covered in curtains for privacy, and the fabric streams in the breeze. Sounds of the street below waft into the open window - honking horns and crying children and rubber tires over dirt roads. The spy watches life go on around them, because they are in the city but not of the city. A silent observer three floors up.  This week, I am that spy. I am the foreigner intently watching the city below me but unable to join its throngs. Friends, I made it to my next destination: the Solomon Islands. As excited as I am to be here, I have to be patient. A short quarantine is required before boarding the ship, so I have 5 days in a spy-worthy hide-away in Honiara.  I love watching the city. I'm up on a hill, so I have a great view over the bustling capital to Iron Bottom Sound. The architecture in...

This week, I have made a point of exploring the natural world around me, not just the city. I made some very cool finds! Just west of Dayuan, I found rice fields! The plants grow in a very wet environment, and you can see there's a pool of water around their roots. Taoist temples are ubiquitous, even seemingly in the middle of nowhere. A lot of homes have potted plants or small gardens right outside their doors. Lattice structures like this are common - I guess this is the Taiwanese version of suburban gardening. The species identification app I use said this was a Caribbean leafleather slug ( Saransinula plebeia ). They're invasive in Taiwan! Speaking of invasive species, this is a giant African land snail ( Lissachatina fulica ). It's another non-native pest in Taiwan.   Taiwan is really a hub for invasive gastropods - this is the channeled apple snail ( Pomacea canaliculata ), which is native to South America.  I walked to the Taiwan Strait! It was low tide, so I got t...

Friends, it has been an interesting week. After my conference wrapped up, I was supposed to just stay one extra night near the Taipei Airport and then fly to my next destination. I was scheduled to join a research expedition in another western Pacific country. Things did not go according to plan.  I got sick and was unable to fly, so I ended up spending an extra week in Taiwan. Tell you what, if you're going to be unexpectedly stuck anywhere in the world, Taiwan is not a bad option. It's safe, there's great public transportation , and you can find ready-made meals in convenience stores on every street corner. Barely anyone speaks English, but I downloaded Mandarin to the translator app on my phone. All in all, I'm doing fine.  I decided to spend this week doing what I do best: exploring and learning. My hotel is in a suburb of Taipei called Taoyuan, specifically the neighborhood called Dayuan. I have made it my mission this week to explore every corner of Dayuan. The sm...

While we were at the Bureau of Cultural Heritage (BUCH), I finally got an answer to a question I have had for a long time. First, I need to give you some background.  The anchor encrustation A few years ago, Calvin used the term "encrustation" in my presence. My ears perked up. There are so many terms in archaeology - like, established jargon in the field - that sounds funny or even made-up to my ears: historiography , ecofacts, lifeways. Those terms regularly drive me nuts. But "encrustation" was something I could immediately grasp - a crust on an artifact, mostly made from calcium carbonate.  "Hey Calvin," I asked. "Is encrustation a biological or chemical phenomenon? As an artifact gets covered in calcium carbonate, is that because there's a purely chemical process like precipitation going on, or is the encrustation from the shells and skeletons of organisms?" He couldn't answer me. In fact, none of the dozen or so archaeologists I ha...

Warships in Taiwan's waters, representing  different eras of Taiwan's history.  After the 2025 International Conference on Underwater Cultural Heritage wrapped up in Kaohsiung, our group of international scholars still had a few items on our agenda. First, we visited a special exhibit at the National Science and Technology Museum called "War and Shipwrecks."  The exhibit was very well-done. It delved into the close relationship between armed conflict and the creation of shipwrecks. Most importantly for me, the exhibit showed the different eras of underwater cultural heritage in Taiwan's waters. I'm not very familiar with Taiwanese history, so I was grateful for the clear framework. Each era was exemplified by a warship, which was highlighted throughout the exhibition. Taiwan was first inhabited by Polynesian indigenous people . Warships from the Ming dynasty (1368 - 1644) are among the oldest shipwrecks in Taiwan's waters. Dutch colonists arrived in the ea...