Does this look like a heart to anyone else?
In October-November of 2014, the Khaled Bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation surveyed the most remote, eastern reefs of the Solomon Islands. To read about our research goals, please click here, and to check out an article I wrote on predicting coral cover in the country, click here. I sampled pocilloporid corals (under a CITES permit) to attempt to make conjectures about their health using a standardized biomarker protocol I developed previously. See the details on the 120 samples here, and the article here. Also, the RNA/DNA/protein extraction protocol can be downloaded here.
And does this coral appear to be smiling at me?
As was the case in all other places we surveyed during the “Global Reef Expedition,” all corals (and their in hospite Symbiodiniaceae populations) were exhibiting the molecular hallmarks of a cellular stress response at the time of sampling; check out this JMP file (for P. acuta only) for details. Here are some supplemental data about all sampled colonies. This file contains the NCBI accession numbers of the mitochondrial open reading frame sequences used for genotyping the coral samples, as well as other information about the samples (site information, depth, sampling dates, environmental data, etc.).
I have posted some of my favorite photos below. For all pictures (hosted on my OneDrive account), here are the October and November ones. Here is the field report from LOF. GPS coordinates of the sites and environmental data (temperature, salinity, reef types, etc.) are also available for download (see hyperlinks above). Since Aperture is no longer supported by Apple, I had to use their Photos program to access my Aperture libraries. This sometimes meant the high-resolution and/or edited versions were lost. The “best of” are also on my Adobe Portfolio.
Nearly all sampled colonies were P. acuta (and not P. damicornis). Ben Wainwright of the Reef Ecology Lab of the National University of Singapore is currently characterizing the microbial communities of ~100 of these samples (including their dinoflagellate endosymbiont assemblages).
Best of Solomon Islands
