Equinox

Friends, it is the first day of spring. Dear goodness, did that sneak up on me. I didn't grow up in an environment that valued or even paid attention to natural cycles - my life was more tightly regulated by the school calendar than the sun. But as I've gotten older, I find myself paying more attention to the climate around me. Circadian and annual cycles in light. Patterns of wind, waves, and tide. I study how organisms survive and adapt in the marine environment, but I'm an organism too. I should pay attention to my habitat. 

The onset of a new season is a chance for me to check in with myself. If winter is ending, I should have finished all my winter projects. The spring projects beckon. Am I ready?

This winter, my focus was on proposal writing. I have cranked out multiple hefty, detailed plans for scientific studies that I want to do over the next few years. Each one has about a 10% chance of getting funded. All I can do now is wait. 

There was one item on my winter list that needed to be wrapped before I could face the spring. A manuscript that I had submitted for publication came back with reviews - again. Sometimes, it can take multiple rounds of revision for a reviewer to be satisfied, and that is certainly the case with this study. Fortunately, the reviewer's comments were much less extensive in this second round than the first. We're getting close. I just had to make a few more revisions. 

The study concerns my hunt for baby corals in Palau. Over 5 field trips in 2018 - 2023, I obsessed over coral recruitment. I wanted to know which species of corals were recruiting to Palau's coral reefs and whether the composition of new recruits matched the already-established adult communities. I tried every method I could think of to capture and observe teeny, tiny corals. I put out tiles for them to settle on. I tried collecting coral rubble, because that's where baby corals naturally settle. I took photos of the tiniest corals I could find on the reef. I surveyed thousands of corals. 

One of my favorite macro photos from our coral survey

My team collected a lot of data, but it's actually difficult to make sense of our results. Typhoon Nalgae hit Palau in 2022, and recovery from that disturbance could have impacted our data in the last two trips (fall 2022 and spring 2023). Even though we counted and identified thousands of corals, the data still don't capture the full diversity of our study sites (our statistics show that). It's been hard to shape a story with so many unknowns in our dataset. 

This is where the power of peer review comes in. I thought I had written a decent paper. The reviewers had some positive feedback, but they also had their own ideas about how to improve our work. Every time I get comments back on a paper, I go through the same emotional rollercoaster. I get grumpy for several days while I work through all the reviewer comments, and I may even decide the reviewers are idiots. But when I finish the work and look back, I re-read my own paper and think "Oh yeah, that's way better." 

The Palau recruit paper is getting there. We've had two rounds of review, and I don't think there will be a third. Thanks to peer-reviewer input, every component of the study is now nailed to the ground, backed up by evidence, and clearly explained when there is uncertainty. 

Hopefully soon, we can share the published paper with the world. 

Happy spring!