From 2013-2016, I had the amazing opportunity to traverse nearly half the globe with the Living Oceans Foundation as part of their “Global Reef Expedition.”
Below I have presented a single iconic image of each of the regions we visited (from French Polynesia to Chagos), though much greater detail can be found elsewhere on the site. My goal is to provide all habitat images, sampled coral images, habitat data, and sampled coral data (genotype, physiology, & molecular biology) on this website, but it will be a work in progress, as the datasets are already huge and still growing even all these years later. For the time being, a list of all corals sampled can be downloaded here. For a list of all genotyped colonies, including NCBI accession numbers, please click here. For a list of all biological material available to share, please see this document. Project reports for the surveyed regions can be found below.
The Golden Shadow in Palau.
Of course, I have worked in many other places, and my beloved Taiwan may well be the world's best place to study the environmental physiology of corals given the diverse array of reefs with very different temperature profiles in near proximity of each other.
A monospecific assemblage of Acropora sp. at Dongsha Atoll. For more information on research on coral bleaching being undertaken at Dongsha Atoll, check out this link.
French Polynesia (Feb. 2011 & April 2013): field report and manuscript describing sampled corals and some environmental data. The second manuscript describing the molecular biology of the sampled coral colonies can be found here. For a previous research trip to Moorea (one of the world's most gorgeous places), click here.
Cook Islands (April-May, 2013): field report and manuscript describing sampled corals and some environmental data. The second manuscript describing the molecular biology of the sampled coral colonies can be found here.
Fiji (Jun. 2013): field report and manuscript describing sampled coral physiology and molecular biology, as well as some environmental data (Mayfield et al. 2017b PLoS ONE). To download the Apple Photos library for all images from Fiji's Lau Archipelago, you can download it off my iCloud Drive. Or just check out the “best of” here.
Tonga (Sept. 2013): field report and manuscript describing sampled coral physiology and molecular biology, as well as some environmental data (Mayfield et al. 2017a PLoS ONE). I have since written a more recent article (Mayfield et al. 2021 Platax) that is described here.
New Caledonia (Nov. 2013). The first manuscript describing the findings from New Caledonia can be found here. the field report from LOF can be found here. A second article describing diel variation in coral physiology can be downloaded here.
Australia (Great Barrier Reef; Sept. 2014). For fun pictures of Oz, go here. For the LOF field report, please go here. My role on this mission was to help with surveys (namely rugosity transects); therefore, samples were not taken.
Solomon Islands (Nov. 2014). The LOF field report can be found here. I just finished the first article (uncorrected proofs) on trying to predict coral cover (also the topic of a recent talk). I’m now working on using the coral physiological data to predict coral resilience.
Chagos (British Indian Ocean Territory; Mar.-May 2015). I have extracted RNAs, DNAs, and proteins from pocilloporid and seriatoporid coral samples collected in the British Indian Ocean Territory, but I have not yet analyzed them. The field report from LOF can be found here. See also this article for more on bleaching in Chagos.
Maldives (Mar. 2016 and Jan. 2017).
Philippines (ongoing).
Indonesia (Maluku; ongoing). BTW, this is among the top five pictures I have ever taken
Florida Keys (2019-2022). Although the reefs are generally in bad shape, there are some reasons for hope. The above Orbicella-dominated habitat is common around Cheeca Rocks (off Islamorada in the Upper Florida Keys).