Crop.

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 her through the whole project. She analyzed samples that we had collected on Polarstern to understand how marine invertebrate larvae were distributed throughout the Fram Strait. She found significant differences between the West Spitsbergen Current and the East Greenland Current. Her analysis provides a mechanistic view of climate change impacts on dispersal in the Arctic Ocean. 

2) The Svalbard CATAIN paper - again, this is one of Kharis's thesis chapters. We deployed CATAIN near Ny-Alesund, Svalbard, recovered the camera a year later, then redeployed for one more year. Altogether, we got an unprecedented dataset on settlement and post-settlement mortality in an Arctic fjord over almost two years. Kharis found that there were strong seasonal differences in settlement - spirorbids settled in the polar night, but barnacles settled in the summer. Within the summer, barnacle settlement was largely driven by biological factors, but pulses of settlement were controlled by physical changes in the environment. It was a really cool analysis!

3) Dropstone Island - This project grew out of a chance encounter in 2021. While I was on Polarstern, the helicopter crew found an iceberg with a large pile of stones. Discovering that iceberg - and being able to visit it by helicopter - sparked a series of investigations that have now culminated in a fantastic interdisciplinary manuscript. My co-author, Thomas Krumpen at the Alfred Wegener Institute, suggested we submit to one of the top journals. If they accept it, this would be my highest-impact paper to date. Fingers crossed!

4) The Porites larval paper - In Palau in 2022-2023, my team conducted a series of experiments to determine whether coral larvae from high-temperature lagoons could disperse, settle, and survive on cooler outer reefs. We had some successes, and we had some failures. We stressed out a lot of baby corals. By stitching together our experiments into a story, I was able to show that a small percentage of coral larvae could potentially disperse, settle, and survive outside the lagoons. I'm very excited to see what the reviewers think of this paper!

5) The Palau shipwreck paper - Over the summer, my intern, Olivia, analyzed a dataset of photos from two shipwrecks and an airplane wreck in Palau. She identified every coral and showed that there were significant differences between the species living on the wrecks and the species on the coral reefs right next to them. I turned her analysis into a paper, which we should be able to submit soon!

6) The eDNA paper - This project grew out of my eDNA project with DPAA. Even though the results for human remains were inconclusive, I thought there were patterns in the data still waiting to be discovered. I handed the dataset to my colleague, Maria, a microbiologist at WHOI. She analyzed microbial genomes at sites with submerged airplanes, and she found that microbes were degrading toxins that those airplanes had introduced to the environment - including aviation fuel and vinyl! We're waiting on permission to submit a paper reporting our findings. 

It has been a really productive fall, and I'm looking forward to seeing my research results in print!