UZELATM: Underwater Zooplankkon Enhancement Light Array
UZELATM (US Patent Application Number PCT/US2023/078357) is a programmable, autonomous, marine deployable, easy to service and maintain underwater light that can operate for an hour a day for up to 6 months on a single battery. My team is evaluating the utility of UZELA to locally enhance zooplankton and promote coral feeding, coral growth, and coral survivorship. This technology has applications for coral restoration and conservation. This work is being conducted in collaboration with Dr. Robert Toonen and Dr. Josh Madin at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology as part of the Rapid Resilient Reefs for Coastal Defense Project (R3D), and with the Coral Restoration Foundation in Florida.
Reef3D: Mapping coral reefs in 3D with a single GoPro camera
My team is collaborating with Dr. Rongjun Qin at OSU and Dr. Jim Porter at UGA to develop an open-source tool for 3D mapping coral reefs using a single go-pro camera. The first phase of the project is calibrating the new tool with traditional measurements, which we are conducting at the Reef Systems Coral Farm in New Albany, OH. This research is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Video Left: Metashaps imaging of corals by OSU postdoc Dr. Ann Marie Hulver. Video Right: Coral volume displacement by undergraduate student Mary Raker
Mediterranean corals cope with ocean acidification at volcanic vents
My team is evaluating how Cladocora caespitosa and Astreoides calycularis corals manage to thrive in at both CO2 vent sites with low pH and adjacent non-vent sites with normal pH. We hypothesize that these corals are heterotrophically plastic and can increase feeding on zooplankton to provide the additional energy needed to thrive in low pH seawater. To evaluate this hypothesis, we teamed up with Drs. Nuria Texeido, Steeve Comeau, and Jean-Pierre Gattuso from the Laboratoire Oceanographique de Villefranche. Corals were collected from vent and non-vent sites in Ischia, Italy in October of 2021 and are currently analyzing them. We are also collaborating on a reciprocal laboratory experiment evaluating the effect of provenance on pH tolerance.
Threatened Florida coral Acropora palmata
My team is conducting research to determine why the endangered coral Acropora palmata grows more in the Dry Tortugas than elsewhere in the Florida Keys. We have determined that the Dry Tortugas corals feed more and have healthier microbiomes than corals elsewhere in the Keys. We speculate that the periodic upwelling in the Dry Tortugas supplies pulses of nutrients that stimulate secondary production and provide more food for the corals. Temperature, salinity, inorganic nutrients, and seawater microbioal community composition did not differ among the sites and were not factors driving higher growth in A. palamata in the Dry Tortugas. In this study, environmental conditions associated with higher heterotrophy and healthier coral microbiomes, not genetics, was the primary driver of coral success. See Chapron et al (2023) for details.
OSU Undergraduate student Margaret Otto’s Second year Transformational ExPerience (STEP) doing research with my team in Hawaii