Post #3

The coral my daughter Emily works on is found in shallow water.  It can easily be collected by snorkeling, or in many locations by wading out from shore.  Below are Emily and Chelsea, an undergraduate research student from the University of Hawaii, wading out from a beach along the northwest side of Moorea late in the afternoon several days ago.  This was the second trip to this spot within the past week.

Just to the right of this picture is a rock about 20 meters off shore that just barely sticks up out of the water.  On both days there was a group of about 8 children, perhaps 3-10 years old,  frolicking on and around the rock.  This was clearly their playground, their sandlot, the way they spent their afternoons.  Imagine being a child and being able to play for hours on end in the ocean, day after day, jumping, swimming, splashing, exploring.  Lucky them!

This is some of what their playground offered:

Sea cucumbers with their frilly oral arms sweeping up food-rich sand to process, and

forests of stag horn coral filled with territorial damselfish, crabs, snails and other critters.

Well, of course the children were curious about what Emily and Chelsea were doing, so....

pretty soon the entire group worked their way over to investigate.

Interestingly, several said they had been told not to collect coral, which is encouraging.  We tried, with our limited command of French, to explain that we were conducting research on coral that would hopefully help save them.  They very quickly learned which species we were interested in, and eagerly wanted to help...

though we couldn't seem to explain that corals removed from the water were of no use to us.

What delightful children, friendly, fun to have around....

Post #2

One of our first priorities was to deploy a SeaFET, a newly designed underwater instrument programmed to measure the sea water’s pH every 10 minutes.  Along with the SeaFET we attached a tidal height recorder and a temperature recorder.  These data loggers help provide researchers with a better picture of the dynamic environment to which organisms are exposed.  Here is a happy Emily with the equipment hose-clamped to a sunken cement piling.  We will recover these in March before we leave and download the stored information.

A second priority was to collect Acanthaster planci, the crown-of-thorns sea star.  This sea star feeds on corals and periodically (about every 20 years or so) experiences huge population explosions where they can become so numerous that they literally can eat almost all the available corals in an infected area.  The reef out front of the labs here suffered such a population explosion in  ~2007, and now instead of having about 60% live coral cover has less than 10%, so it looks pretty dead at the moment.  It reminds me of the seemingly dead areas after forest fires, and like new seedlings growing in burned areas, the seemingly barren reef areas out front are loaded with tiny coral “recruits” less than 3 cm across.   Thus the cyclical “destruction” and regrowth of the coral community continues.  This has been going on for decades, if not centuries.  Interestingly, the local Polynesians see this periodic rebirth of the coral reef as a good thing, and even have a traditional song about it.

However, this means that with little live coral around, the crown-of-thorns is pretty rare right now here.  I have found no more than 2 in any given scuba dive or snorkel.  Here is a picture of one I found on my second dive.

Unfortunately, every one so far has not had ripe gonads.  (I need to get their eggs and sperm for my experiments.)  At first I determined that they were not “sexy” by dissecting them back at the labs by simply making a cut in the “armpit” area where the gonads are.  This should not kill them for they are good at regenerating.  Now I take my dissecting scissors into the water with me and open them up in situ.  Here is a male after being opened up.  The orange-brown organ is digestive gland.  The testes in this animal were tiny and not easily discerned here.  Bummer!

Perhaps the sea stars do not have large gonads because they are starving now that there is very little for them to eat.  Thus tomorrow we hope to snorkel on the west side of the island where the live coral cover is reported to be much higher.  Wish us luck!

Post #1

This spring I am on sabbatical leave from SUNY Cortland where I have been teaching in the Department of Biological Sciences for many years.  At Cortland I have been lucky enough to teach classes in invertebrate zoology and marine biology, among others.  Although my formal training has involved studying primarily temperate marine invertebrates, I take my marine biology classes during the January intersession to wonderful sites in Belize in Central America operated by International Zoological Expeditions.

This January-March I am working at UC Berkeley’s Richard B. Gump South Pacific Research Station on the island of Moorea, which is just west of Tahiti in French Polynesia.  My research is in collaboration with Dr. Gretchen Hofmann, a professor at UC Santa Barbara well known for her work on sea urchin development and more recently for running a lab group consisting of graduate students and post-docs focusing on the effects of ocean acidification (OA) on the physiology of and early life history stages of marine invertebrates. 

So what does Moorea look like?  Take a look:

This is looking east with Tahiti in the background.  The Gump Station is in Cook's Inlet which goes in from the second large indentation in the fringing reef 7/8 of the way back on the left side of the island.

There were basically two reasons why I was drawn to the Gump Station this spring: one is the opportunity to do some interesting research in the tropical South Pacific, and second is the opportunity to work with my daughter Emily, who is a graduate student of Dr. Hofmann’s.  Emily is investigating the effects of OA and increased temperature on the larvae of the coral Pocillopora damicornis, a common branching coral of the IndoPacific.   My research goal for this trip is to investigate the effect that OA might have on fertilization success in the crown-of-thorns sea star Acanthaster planci.

We spent more than a week at UC Santa Barbara getting ready for this trip by packing carefully (there are very few resources here at Gump, so we needed to bring everything from the chemicals we needed to slides and cover slips) and practicing some the experimental protocols and water chemistry I would be doing here.  We arrived  in Tahiti late on  January 17 and had to spend the night there before taking an early morning ferry to Moorea.

That first day at Gump involved a lot of getting oriented, unpacking and organizing the lab space we are to occupy for the next two months.   There are maybe 20 other professors, post-docs, grad students, undergraduates and technicians energetically conducting research here, so the place is a beehive of activity.   At any time, there are folks heading out or coming back in one of the numerous outboard boats from their snorkeling or scuba research dives.