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| Corals living near the rudder of a WWII ship in Palau |
Friends, I am excited to announce the publication of a scientific paper from my lab! This paper concerns the communities of animals that live on underwater
shipwrecks,
airplanes, and natural coral reefs in Palau. Back in 2022 and 2023, while I was in Palau for my
Porites project, I used extra days to investigate some of the WWII remnants in Palau's waters. My team produced a dataset of photos showing corals, sponges, and oysters living on each habitat. Last summer, I asked my intern, Olivia,
to identify all the species in the photos. Her analysis showed clear differences between the corals living on the ships and planes compared to the naturally-occurring coral reefs that were right next to them. We thought this finding was incredibly interesting. The difference can't be driven by larval dispersal because the wrecks and reefs were only meters apart. They had to be driven by the substrates themselves - the metals that make up shipwrecks and airplanes, versus the limestone that makes up coral reefs. We concluded that the chemical nature of a substrate - iron ships, aluminum airplanes, or limestone reefs - has some influence on the species that can live there, and future research should focus on figuring out why.
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