Meyer-Kaiser lab

Hurricane Isaias forecast from the National Weather Service. The red area is Destin - Fort Walton Beach, FL. I am supposed to be diving right now.  I packed my rebreather this week, put my wetsuit in a suitcase, made sure I grabbed my fins. But fate would not have it be so. In the year of a Super El Ni ño, when there were supposed to be a lower number of hurricanes in the Atlantic than normal, my trip still got weathered out. There was one hurricane. It made landfall exactly where I was planning to go. Two days before I was supposed to be there.  If the universe is sending a message, it is addressed to me in particular.  I left the rebreather at home, delayed my flight by a few days, and then made my way to Destin - Fort Walton Beach, Florida. We may not be diving this week - I'm told the visibility offshore is so bad, you can't see your own hands underwater - but there are still plenty of reasons for me to be here.  Ladies and gentlemen, the SS United States is goi...

Any comic book or graphic novel fans out there? This post is for you!  A while ago, I was contacted by an MIT professor teaching a class: CMS 306 Making Comics and Sequential Art. In that class, students learn to draw and narrate stories using sequential panels, much like a comic book. A classic assignment is for students to team up with a scientist and tell the story of their research.  Now, I love a good science-art collaboration. I see metaphors for research in modern art museums, and I find my scientific experiences reflected in music , dance , and drawing . When I saw the professor's email, I jumped enthusiastically on board.  There were actually two teams of students who chose my work. One created a comic about larval dispersal to shipwrecks, and the other team focused on how shipwreck materials impact recruitment. The recruitment team used a resurrected ship captain as their narrator, which was a really cool twist! The final, colorized version of their comic appe...

Co-hosts Kharis Schrage and Jane Weinstock introducing the  Larval Biology Symposium in Woods Hole.  When I walked into the auditorium, I immediately spotted a familiar face. Then another. Then another. The room was full of researchers I knew and admired. I could hardly decide who to greet first.  Every good scientific conference feels like a family reunion , and the Larval Biology Symposium was the best reunion of them all. A Larval Biology Symposium had not been organized for four years. In fact, the society behind it had largely gone dormant, to the detriment of research collaborations worldwide. Two WHOI graduate students - including my former student, Kharis - decided to resurrect the conference, hosting the first reincarnation right here in Woods Hole. There was extreme enthusiasm across the marine research community, and this year's Larval Biology Symposium attracted about 100 researchers from across North America, Europe, and Asia.  The scientific presentatio...

Friends, one of the most gratifying parts of my job is cheering on my colleagues as they accomplish great things. Over the past few weeks, I have had two opportunities to do that.  The archaeologist on my team, Calvin Mires, was selected as the National Lecturer for 2026 by the Archaeological Institute of America. It's a huge honor. Only one individual is selected each year, and that person is invited to deliver seminars at AIA chapters across the country. Calvin traveled to the College of William and Mary for his first address, which took place just two weeks ago. It was a resounding success. Calvin reported that the lecture hall was so fall, late arrivals were left to stand in the aisles. A grateful audience member even gifted Calvin a few books.  I am excited for Calvin, not just for the honor he clearly deserves, but for the opportunity that his speaking tour represents. He is developing a reputation for excellence in the archaeological community. Every time he shares his...

The end of summer this year felt like the end of a roller coaster. I had been speeding along at who-knows-how-many miles per hour, banking around tight curves , turning upside-down , enjoying  the thrills  with my hands in the air, but then all of a sudden, it came to a stop. The coaster car entered a dark tunnel, screeched to a halt, and I found myself disembarking before even registering that the season was over. Oof.  The last major event of my summer came in the final week of August. The team for my Marine Debris project marked a major milestone by deploying our robot, ResQ, in the ocean. ResQ was designed by my collaborator, Robin Littlefield, and his team of engineers, specifically to recover derelict fishing gear or other equipment lost at sea. The vehicle's design was inspired by a leatherback sea turtle, to make ResQ as sleek and immune to entanglements as possible. After two years of work, ResQ was ready for her first in-field demonstration, so we gathered on a...

My husband, Carl, walked into Redfield Auditorium. He had told me he was coming, but it felt surprising all the same. Carl hadn't set foot in a WHOI building in years. Yet here he was, showing up in the middle of the day to support me.  The lights dimmed, and I launched into my practiced speech: 45 minutes of scientific storytelling. I shared my memory from 2018, when a PhD student's seminar in that exact same auditorium sparked my interest in coral larvae. I explained how I formed a collaborative team to undertake research in Palau. I walked the audience through our questions , our approaches to answering them, and the curve-balls that hit us along the way. My story was told in data, but it was also deeply human - behind every discovery was a collaboration, a team , even a family.  While studying coral communities , we became a community ourselves.  When I finished speaking, my body relaxed. I exhaled deeply. With my pre-practiced script at an end, I answered free-fo...

Friends, I'm happy to announce that another Meyer-Kaiser lab paper is out today! My postdoc, Johanna Weston, spent her time at WHOI developing a plankton sampler that could go to full ocean depth without breaking the bank. Her vision was to enable hadal research worldwide, including countries without huge financial resources to dedicate to science. Her sampler, DeepZoo, got its first deployments locally before moving onto the East Pacific Rise and eventually Argentina. The results of Johanna's efforts have appeared today in a published paper in Methods in Ecology and Evolution . You can read it here:  https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.70392

Early morning low tide at the jetty Sometimes on this blog, I use the titles of my posts as a motif: a series of posts with similar titles will tell a cohesive story or use a unifying metaphor. My last post was "Waking up," and this installment is "Early morning." The two posts must be related, right? Nope, I've just been getting up at the crack of dawn. No metaphor needed - this time, the title is literal.  August is anemone spawning season. My early-morning routine started last Friday, when I went to the Cape Cod Jetty in Sandwich, MA for the 6:30 am low tide. Metridium senile lives in the protected spaces between rocks in the low intertidal, so I got up close and personal with the jetty. I crouched with my feet in the water, my knees in algae, and my hand tucked under a boulder as I scraped slimy creatures off the stone with my finger nails. More than once, I could feel a fisherman's eyes on me in a mix of confusion and judgment. After only half an hour,...

The end of every research cruise is disorienting . For weeks, I have seen the same finite group of people ,  and we spontaneously formed a miniature society. Then all of a sudden, I am back where I started - in this case, home in Woods Hole - and surrounded by an entirely different group of people. It feels almost like waking up from a really good dream.  I took some time off after the Heroic Age cruise . In fact, the day after I stepped off the ship, my husband and I flew to the Midwest for a long weekend with my family. My experience at sea slipped entirely out of my mind as I played in a water park with my 6-year-old nephew. The Labrador Sea was nowhere in my thoughts as I cheered with my sister-in-law at a kitschy dinner theater. If the expedition was a dream, that long weekend was the delightful delirium that comes in the early light of dawn.  So here I am friends, back at home. By day, I write my dreams on paper , asking the funding powers-that-be to grant me more ...

R/V Atlantis in Woods Hole, just prior to departure Yours truly briefing the science party on the biological goals for our expedition. Photo by Ken Kostel. This sign used to say "scientific laboratory." The room became the home base for CBC News on board, so they amended the door sign appropriately.  Rocky cliffs of Newfoundland We could see Greenland in the distance from the Terra Nova site. Sunset on an iceberg, seen at the Terra Nova site. The ROV team hosted a ping pong tournament on the transit home.  Every game had three players: two humans and the motion of the ship.

One of the marine technicians aboard Atlantis has a sticker on her water bottle that grabbed my attention. It features a smiling cartoon frog with the caption, "The horrors persist, but so do I." What a fitting sentiment for our last few days at sea.  After leaving Terra Nova , we steamed due south into the North Atlantic. A shorter route would have been to steam southwest, along the Canadian coast, but a large storm covered most of the Labrador Sea. We skirted around it, far enough from the epicenter to be safe but not so far as to excessively extend our travel time. As Atlantis pitched and rolled in confused 8-ft seas, I retreated to my bunk. As this point in my life , with the depth of sea-going experience that I have, I knew it was pointless to fight . So I took my anti-nausea medication and hunkered into bed, only venturing upstairs to eat carbohydrates every few hours.  Thankfully, my body acclimates quickly . After a few days of my eat-sleep-medicine cycle, I emerge...

VSLAM in action on Terra Nova. Left panel shows the  ROV video; right panel shows the poitn cloud.  Another day, another night, another night shift. I settled into my designated place, right behind the ROV team, where I could see the screens and take notes without interfering with the pilot. The ROV descended to the seafloor and approached Terra Nova . When the pilot felt comfortable, he called to a colleague at the back of the room: "Slam it!" No, that was not a command to smash equipment. We've been using a software called VSLAM to make 3D models of our target shipwrecks, Quest and Terra Nova , in real time. As the ROV's camera records photo after photo, the images are fed into VSLAM, and a point cloud showing the structure of the wreck materializes on the screen. VSLAM is an incredibly useful tool - because the point cloud is made in real time, it's easy to identify gaps in the model and back-track to cover them. As the model slowly comes together, we can get...

An iceberg seen near R/V Atlantis . Photo by Sam Dahlgren, with the camera pointing through a pair of binoculars My phone buzzed under my pillow, rousing me from a shallow sleep. I opened my eyes and checked my watch. It was a few minutes before 1 pm. With ROV dives taking place at night, I've been on a nocturnal schedule. My phone buzzed again, and I swiped on the screen to open it. There were two new messages on the expedition text thread. The first said simply "Land ho!" The second was a photo of an iceberg.  I knew that Terra Nova sank close to Greenland. I had been told we would see the rocky, ice-laden island. But once we arrived, the land and the ice felt surprising all the same. Physically being in a place is so different from reading about it or watching it on video.  The ROV team deployed our little robotic vehicle into the cold, clear sea. After a short descent, the vehicle arrived on the seafloor. It looked muddy, just like most of the ocean bottom. The ROV...

"Corporate needs you to find the difference between this picture and this picture...they're the same picture."  - The Office , and countless memes since 11 years in between. Same exuberant Kirstin.  In 2015, I had a life-changing experience: I dove in  Alvin . Being underwater and personally visiting the deep ocean was the most profound thing I had ever experienced. I vowed to do everything in my power to get back into the sub, and to get others the chance to dive.  It took me 11 years.  Yesterday, I was offered the opportunity to dive in Alvin to visit the Quest shipwreck in the Labrador Sea. I was immensely grateful to once again enter the deep sea. Friends, I have the coolest job on this ocean planet.  We descended at a site some 200 m away from the wreck itself. The archaeologists on board have been calling the site "the plunge pit," because they suspect it contains debris that fell off of Quest when she sank. There were some bright spots at the si...

Quest 's bow The ROV pressed forward into the darkness. Out of the dim blue haze ahead of its camera, a vertical wall emerged - Quest 's hull. The vessel rested upright on the seafloor, with its bow standing proud above the sediment.  The colors were vibrant. Orange and pink strands hung from the wooden structure like birthday streamers - probably my birthday, given the palette. I leaned forward, stepping off of my chair, to narrow the distance between my face and the screen. I could feel the ROV pilot's eyes shift in my direction as my face hovered over his shoulder. He didn't say anything, but the side-eye showed I had come close enough. Note to self: respect others' personal boundaries, even when there is cool biology in view.  I sat back in my chair and pondered what I was seeing. The streamers were puzzling. I have seen plenty of marine organisms in my day - gastropods and tunicates and priapulids, polychaetes and crinoids and chaetognaths. Monoplacophorans...

The first thing I noticed were the nets. As WHOI's Falcon ROV flew across the seafloor towards a bright sonar target, a tangled mass of fishing net appeared in our camera's view.  A fishing net on the stern of Quest "Oh, it's a net!" came the exclamation from the back of the room. We saw the nets before we even saw the wreck. They were everywhere - on the sediment, draped over the hull, coiled on the deck. Our target shipwreck, Quest , was absolutely covered in fishing nets.  My mind flashed back to 2020. That year, I was the chief scientist for a team working in Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary . We extensively documented the passenger steamship Portland , which had three entangled fishing nets. In fact, my team's research showed that  two new nets had impacted the wreck between 2009 and 2019. I remember the surprise of finding those nets. I remember the concern my team felt for the ROV and the careful planning we undertook to prevent entanglement. ...

Seen near St. Anthony's, Newfoundland "I love this country so much, it's so beautiful!" Riley bounced a few times on his toes as he declared his love for Canada. I had to admit - St. Anthony's, Newfoundland, was a particularly impressive spot. From the bow of R/V Atlantis , we could see limestone cliffs rising from the sea. A lighthouse perched atop the rocks warned vessels to keep their distance. Beside the lighthouse was a small cluster of houses nestled in a valley. With the sun shining on a bright blue sea, the scene looked like a sleepy storybook fishing village. Patches of snow rested on some hillcrests, even though it was July. I imagined the residents of St. Anthony's hiking to the tops of those hills each weekend - what a privilege that must be.  Many of the participants aboard Atlantis have memories of St. Anthony's. Two years ago, when the Royal Canadian Geographic Society (RCGS) launched an expedition to find Quest with side-scan sonar , they...

We gathered in the Hydro lab. This room, located on the aft port side of R/V Atlantis , is usually home base for robotics teams. The Alvin team uses it for desk work, and during my last Atlantis cruise in 2015, the team for the Sentry autonomous vehicle set up their equipment here. On AT52, my current expedition, the Hydro lab is home base for the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) team.  We're using a small ROV - a tethered robotic vehicle - to survey our two target shipwrecks, Quest and Terra Nova . The ROV can stay on the seafloor for longer than Alvin , and the video feed can be live-streamed all over the ship for everyone to see. The two vehicles - one manned, the other unmanned - perfectly complement one another.  Dwight (chief scientist), Andy, and Sam (ROV team) during the ROV test dive As we steamed north past Nova Scotia, we paused to conduct a test dive with the ROV. The vehicle we're using has completed numerous missions as part of WHOI's Ocean Observing Initia...

I rounded the corner, and the wind hit me - literally. The force of the air pressing into my chest felt like I had walked straight into a brick wall. I stumbled backward and grabbed the railing. Any sane person would have turned back, walked back down the stairs, and retreated inside. But I am not a sane person.  I pressed forward, one steel-toed boot step at a time. On R/V Atlantis , scientists are allowed on the bow - and I was determined to take full advantage of that access. I was practicing my ritual, breaking up long periods of laptop work by stepping outside, no matter the weather. It was important to me to experience the environment and remember where I am on planet Earth. The motion of the ship intensified as I marched determinedly forward. The closer I got to my destination, the more I could feel the bow's upward swing with each wave. Then a rogue wave splashed against the side of the vessel, and I was sprayed with chilled seawater. I laughed - my old friend was saying he...

"I feel like I'm visiting family!" Beverly exclaimed as she hugged me. I returned her embrace whole-heartedly, because I felt the same.  After a second, I pulled back and met her eyes, hands still on her shoulders. "Right?!"  I had never met Beverly in person, but we felt like old, close friends. We were introduced a few years ago by a mutual collaborator, archaeologist Calvin Mires. We hit it off instantly over Zoom and developed a research proposal to submit together. Alas, the funding gods would not see us collaborate, because the proposal was declined. But we stayed in touch nonetheless.  Beverly lives in Israel. Her research uses geological methods - mostly sediment cores - to answer archaeological questions. Beverly is also obsessed with tsunamis. Any time she takes a sediment core, she can tell instantly if there was a tsunami in the study site's geological history. "Tsunami deposits," which consist of large rocks and shells, jump out of the...

Friends, time is a funny thing. Sometimes, it seems to crawl along, but other times, it flies past me with a nearly-audible whoosh. The past few weeks have been a waterfall of events - and then it was July.  Our dive site, Outer Brewster island I want to highlight two events. First, I went SCUBA diving with a friend in Boston Harbor. It was so good to get in the water again, and trust me, my trim was much better this time. Another friend had actually emailed me to ask for a few sea stars, so I spent part of my dive gathering specimens off the seafloor for her. The sea stars are safe in my freezer now, waiting for shipment to her lab. Soon, they will contribute to research! Another key part of my summer has been preparing for my scallop project . The last two years, I have gone out on scallop fishing boats to collect samples . This year, my schedule was full enough that I didn't go out to sea myself - but I still had to do all the prep work. I spent a few days gathering all the sa...