My precious

The beginning of a new calendar year is proposal season! Federal research funding agencies have received their annual budget allocation, and scientists scramble to get a piece of the pie. Deadlines stack up, and stress can run high - especially for the administrative staff who handle proposal submissions. Everyone at work feels like a headless chicken for a month or two. 

The last living Porites fragment. 
Photo by James Wainaina.

This year, I have an ambitious list of proposals to write. One of them is actually a revision of a proposal that I wrote last year with my colleague, James. Our proposal was rejected because the reviewers claimed we did not have enough preliminary data to prove that we would be successful. James and I have spent the last 6 months gathering preliminary data to include in the revised proposal. So far, we have met most of our data goals - all but one, in fact. 

James wanted to isolate viruses from the mucus of our study species, the coral Porites lobata, to prove to the reviewers that we can do it. Isolating a virus requires a live coral sample, so James asked if I knew anyone who had live Porites lobata they might be willing to share. 

Well, what do you know, I actually do know someone who brought live Porites lobata from Palau to Massachusetts a few years ago. It was Cas, the postdoc on my Palau coral project. He collected fragments of Porites corals while we were in the field in 2023 and brought them back to Boston University, where he was based at the time. I knew the corals survived the journey, but I didn't know their fate after transport. All we could do was ask. 

Cas had one live Porites fragment left. One. And he didn't even need it anymore - he had donated it to a teaching lab at BU when he left. Cas put James and me in contact with the head of the teaching lab, who was more than willing to ship us the coral. Oh. My. Goodness. 

Small coral, big world. Photo by James Wainaina.

I honestly couldn't believe that we found a Porites coral still alive in a Massachusetts aquarium two years after collection, much less a colleague willing to ship it to us. The day that the coral was scheduled to arrive at WHOI, both James and I were on high alert - we would not let the precious coral die in a mailbox. He received the box and headed straight to WHOI's Environmental Systems Laboratory, where an aquarium was already prepared and waiting. He had replicated the temperature, salinity, and light conditions the coral experienced at BU exactly, to reduce stress on the fragment when it entered the WHOI tanks. So far, the coral seems to be doing well. 

Our next step is to collect mucus from the coral, spread the mucus on a culturing medium, and isolate colonies of bacteria and viruses. If James' methodology works out, then we will have excellent preliminary data to include in the next version of our proposal. I am very excited to see what he finds, and I hope our proposal will be funded on the second try!