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.