This #MicroMonday, we’re hollering, “Yeehaw!” 🤠 It might not be the kind of exclamation you’d expect to hear at an ocean sciences laboratory.
That is, unless a colleague recently returned from wrangling tiny wild marine invertebrates in Bermuda, which is precisely what Bigelow Laboratory Research Scientist Dave Ernst recently did — and all without throwing a single tiny lasso.
This summer, he collaborated with the Marine Benthic Ecology and Ecophysiology Lab at Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences to round up colonies of Porites astreoides, the mustard hill coral, from nearby Hog Reef. The colonies were allowed to spawn in the Bermuda Marine Mesocosm Facility, where the larvae (like the one seen here) settled and eventually metamorphosed into juvenile polyps.
Dave collected samples of each major stage of development for the species. He’ll use these samples to develop molecular tools for non-invasive monitoring of wild coral larvae in the water column.
📸: Teagan Roome.
