The recruitment paper

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/article/10.1007/s00338-026-02873-4