Meyer-Kaiser lab

Every spring, daffodils are the first flowers to bloom in Woods Hole. In fact, the emergence of their light yellow petals has become my personal signal that spring is underway. And Woods Hole is awash in daffodils this week. Meanwhile, in the lab, spring has sprung with a beautiful bloom of data. Over the winter, my technician, Sarah, spent countless hours huddled indoors, identifying corals living on shipwrecks. Her cold-weather grind of image analysis is now reaching its endpoint, and as the ground thaws outside, her painstaking annotations are emerging as fresh, green datasets.  Opening those data petals to achieve their full beauty is my job. This week, I have begun analyzing our data to find patterns, discover significant differences, and figure out how the biological community relates to the 3D structure of each shipwreck. My process involves making lots of figures , running every statistical test I can think of, then standing back  and letting the data speak to me....

I pulled off the highway and followed my phone's instructions to turn on Fourth Street. The rolling hills of Bethlehem, PA carried me into town like waves rippling onto a sandy seashore. A church steeple made of dark stone rose from the sidewalk on my left, piercing the evening sky with its spire. Low, square-ish homes lined the street on both sides, bearing architectural signatures from decades gone by. I stopped at a red light, and a man carrying a plastic shopping bag slumped across the street in front of me. As I approached downtown, the buildings became denser, the blocks shorter, all perpendicular lines that chafed against the organic arcs of the green hills surrounding. This gritty steel town in the smooth, rolling hills seemed an unlikely host for a marine biology research lab, but host it was. I had arrived at Lehigh University.  Nicole (center) with her advisory committee after her  dissertation defense. Congratulations, Dr. Pittoors! For the past several years, I ha...

Bethany told me to pick her up at the bus station. We had not seen each other in at least 6 years - in fact, "how long has it been" was a major topic of conversation on our car ride together. A lot has changed for Bethany since she was last at WHOI. For starters, she got a PhD, and I could tell. When I last saw Bethany, she was an inexperienced student just figuring out how to do science. Now, she is a seasoned professional with her own unique views on topics ranging from deep-sea biodiversity to data management to why exploration matters. It took us the full hour-long ride to Brewster and hour-long ride back to catch up.  Our destination in Brewster was the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History. I think of CCMNH as "the little museum that could." The facility is modest in size, but the content is high-quality. Displays range from the indigenous history of Cape Cod to native species in our waters, exploring human-environment relationships along the way. I actually cons...

A juvenile coral captured in our photo survey Friends, I am proud to announce that one of my scientific studies has appeared in print. Just this morning, Coral Reefs published my team's work on coral recruitment in Palau. We surveyed juvenile and adult corals at our study sites in 2021 - 2023 to understand how early life-history bottlenecks shape community composition. This work involved deploying and recovering tiles , conducting photo surveys , and identifying thousands of corals . In the end, we found that the community composition of juvenile corals was different from adults at the same site - but it's not entirely clear why. Most likely, dispersal limitation, post-settlement mortality, typhoon impacts, and the inherent difficulty of capturing the astounding diversity of Indo-Pacific corals all interacted to influence the patterns we observed.   I encourage you to read the study for yourself. You can find it here, in the journal Coral Reefs : https://link.springer.com/art...

Back when I was an undergraduate, I did a project on the taxonomy of freshwater crabs in Lake Kivu, one of the Rift Valley lakes in sub-Saharan Africa. I had plenty of experience describing and differentiating species of African freshwater crabs, so my advisor decided I was ready to take on the project. There was only one problem: all the crabs looked the same. It's not that I was inexperienced - far from it - but for whatever reason, in Lake Kivu, all the species of crabs lost their defining spiky features and became little smooth crabs. I eventually found a few structures that differed between the species and wrote reliable descriptions, but the process was far from easy.  Then during Covid, when I started foraging in the woods around Massachusetts (partly as an excuse to get out of the house and partly as apocalypse preparation), I came across countless non-descript mushrooms. My identification guide warned against picking "little brown mushrooms" with no distinct feat...

"Life imitates art more than art imitates life." - Oscar Wilde Friends, we live in a fascinating world. Sometimes, it seems to me that there is an underlying structure ordering our lives. For me, that structure is largely composed of parallel lines: one line representing my scientific research, the other representing my personal experiences. The two seem eerily parallel at times.  I am a community ecologist. I spent my PhD years studying communities of animals to figure out how they were structured. What species lived best together, which ones preferred to be apart. Meanwhile, I moved across the ocean three different times, planting myself in a new culture each time. My experience reflected my scientific work: I was conducting a personal experiment in community assembly.  For my postdoc, I shifted my focus to an earlier stage of invertebrate life-cycles. I worked on larval settlement  while simultaneously settling down myself. My trans-continental wanderings led me to...