Meyer-Kaiser lab

A hydromedusa (top), cerinula larva (middle), and claim (bottom). Photos by Declan Lane. Recently, two of my high school interns asked for a lesson. We have been working for months on sorting plankton from the Arctic, but all these samples are preserved in ethanol. They don't move. They just hang there in the liquid, begging to be sorted. My interns wondered what it was like to sort live plankton instead.  Of course I was happy to show them. We grabbed a plankton net from my lab, dragged it through the water off the dock in Eel Pond, and looked at the sample together under the microscopes. It is so satisfying for me to  introduce new  students to science - I love guiding their curiosity, listening to their exclamations, and showing them the incredible diversity in the ocean.  The sample we collected happened to be full of medusae. If you've heard the word "medusa" before, it was probably in context of Greek mythology, but the woman with snakes for hair is not what

A 360-degree sunset in mid-afternoon. Photo by Angela Meyer. If you have been anywhere in North America this week, you heard about the solar eclipse. Hotel rooms and Airbnbs in the path of totality were booked to capacity. Eclipse glasses were a hot commodity. Crowds gathered in parks yesterday afternoon for "watch parties." The only way to not hear about the solar eclipse was to hide under a rock.  For those experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime event, I get it. A solar eclipse is a big deal. Here in Woods Hole, we had 91% occlusion, which was pretty impressive. Ambient light was certainly dimmer than I would have expected for 3 pm. It was strange to step outside yesterday and feel the cool air in mid-afternoon. What's even stranger is that this is my third solar eclipse in 4 years - I've seen partial eclipses during field work in the high Arctic and Palau . I'll add this one to the list.  Total solar eclipse. Photo by Angela Meyer. My parents were in the path of t

I donned my nitrile gloves, wiped down the lab bench with ethanol, and opened my freezer. One hundred and eighty coral samples stared me in the face. Each one rested quietly in its small ethanol tube. They had no idea what was about to happen to them, but I did. The battle belonged to me. Friends, I have spent a lot of time extracting DNA from Porites lobata . I mean, a lot of time. So much time. I started with a round of 90 samples in 2019 . That was followed by another round of 90 in late 2021 . Don't forget about the 150 samples I did in 2022 , either. I couldn't even tell you at this point how much time I've spent extracting DNA. The process is pretty repetitive, to the point that I treat it like a form of meditation .  Take a wild guess what I've been doing this week. Yep, extracting DNA from Porites lobata . This time, the corals in my dataset are parents that contributed offspring to our experiments last spring. We did a ton of experiments - to the point that it

I had a pretty entertaining conversation with Calvin this morning. We were commiserating about a particularly complex proposal. The thing is nasty. It has sub-awards, it has in-kind, it has cost-sharing, it has about 15 different partners. Calvin described it as a menacing, slimy, Hydra monster of a proposal.  I shrugged. "Whatever; I have a sword."  Calvin laughed out loud.  Photogrammetric model of a fishing net on the Portland bow. Credit: Marine Imaging  Technologies.  For all the times I've prided myself on playing scientific defense , not offence, I must admit there are times when I need a sword - or at least an offensive strategy. How do you get ahead of a problem? How do you slay a 3-headed monster?  The proposal itself is actually the closest I'll ever come to playing offence: prevention. We're proposing to partner with stakeholders across Massachusetts to prevent future entanglements of fishing gear on shipwrecks. You know what I'm talking about - m

Some of the common coral genera in our study "Every project starts out a hairy beast." - I wrote this in a text to a friend today  It is a sunny Friday in Woods Hole, and I am feeling victorious. Recently, I've been working on a paper about recruitment dynamics of corals in Palau. You know - the project that had me so obsessed with finding juvenile corals for 5 years. I had such a hard time getting baby corals to settle on tiles that I gave up and started looking for them on the reef. Turns out my camera was a much more effective tool for finding small juveniles than the tiles I had tried. Over the course of 3 years, my team collected thousands of images . Every single one of them had to be identified   to at least genus . The project was one giant, hairy beast.  When I finally took a look at the final data, it was messy . There were significant differences all over that dataset - between adults and juveniles, between juveniles in the photos and recruits on the tiles, b

Beignets at Cafe du Monde! You know those "Three Perfect Days" ads they have on airplanes? They play on the little screens in the seat backs while you're boarding. Every one starts with scenery of a beautiful destination that the airline serves, followed by suggestions for what to do while you're there. There are exactly three suggestions, corresponding to three days on the ground.  I have the same thought about every "Three Perfect Days" ad: that's not enough to do for three days. You could do every suggested activity in a single day. Maybe a day and a half. I tell you what, friends, if there was ever a travel planner who agreed with me, her name is Betsy. She is my husband's cousin, and she lives with her family in Louisiana. As soon as Ocean Sciences ended, I switched into Aunt Mode (I guess technically First-Cousin-By-Marriage Mode) and spent the weekend with Betsy's family.  It was 1.5  perfect  days. We met for dinner. We went to the aquari

Probably the most exciting part of my week at Ocean Sciences was getting invited to a press event. The American Geophysical Union, the ginormous professional society behind Ocean Sciences, organizes these roundtable discussions between certain scientists and reporters at every conference. Each scientist gets a few minutes to explain their research, and then the floor opens for anyone to ask questions. Usually, the moderator is the one who asks the most questions, but the goal is to keep the conversation flowing. The roundtables are recorded and posted online so anyone can watch them later.  A screenshot from the roundtable recording - here, I'm talking about a recent project in the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to yours truly, panelists in my roundtable included Melanie Damor, an archaeologist with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, and Nathan Figueredo, a student at Louisiana State University. Our research was very complementary, so it turned into a great discussion. If you'