Early morning

Early morning low tide at the jetty

Sometimes on this blog, I use the titles of my posts as a motif: a series of posts with similar titles will tell a cohesive story or use a unifying metaphor. My last post was "Waking up," and this installment is "Early morning." The two posts must be related, right?

Nope, I've just been getting up at the crack of dawn. No metaphor needed - this time, the title is literal. 

August is anemone spawning season. My early-morning routine started last Friday, when I went to the Cape Cod Jetty in Sandwich, MA for the 6:30 am low tide. Metridium senile lives in the protected spaces between rocks in the low intertidal, so I got up close and personal with the jetty. I crouched with my feet in the water, my knees in algae, and my hand tucked under a boulder as I scraped slimy creatures off the stone with my finger nails. More than once, I could feel a fisherman's eyes on me in a mix of confusion and judgment. After only half an hour, I had over two dozen anemones in my bucket. 

I made a quick trip to the lab to deposit my precious specimens in seawater tanks, then dashed home to shower off the low tide smell. Now, my morning routine includes a sunrise trip to the lab every single day. Metridium spawns shortly after sunrise in August and September. Seven days a week, I arrive in Woods Hole at 6:30 am to turn off the flow-through seawater. If the anemones spawn, I don't want their gametes to get flushed out of tanks by the flow. At 6:35, the automatic timer in the wet lab turns the lights on, simulating sunrise (the actual sunrise has been ~6 am). Every 5 minutes for the following hour, I hover over my anemones, watching closely for any release of eggs or sperm. 

So far, I have gotten sperm on three mornings. That's a good sign - I collected my anemones early enough in the year to get some gametes. But sperm alone do not viable larvae make. I need to keep monitoring until I get both eggs and sperm on the same day. 

When I did similar monitoring in 2024, I had gamete releases by a few individuals in the lead-up to my lucky egg-and-sperm day. Hopefully, this year will be similar! I want a big batch of Metridium larvae for an experiment, so I am waiting for both gamete types to be available for fertilization at the same time. 

Until then, I will enjoy the early mornings.