Current Research Photos

UZELA: Underwater Zooplankkon Light Enhancement Array

UZELA (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, and with the Coral Restoration Foundation in Florida.

Dr. Grottoli, Shannon and Ann Marie doing fieldwork in Hawaii

Bleached and healthy corals in UZELA experiment

UZELA lights on at night (and controls without lights)

Grottoli tending to UZELA experiment

UZELA experiment setup

Jacob, Dr. Grottoli and Ann Marie with Moku O’Loe (HIMB) in the background.

Ann Marie and Shannon with UZELA

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.

Ischia collection team: Dr. Andrea Grottoli, grad student Ann Marie Hulver, Dr. Nuria Teixido

Outdoor lab setup in Ischia.

Dr. Grottoli and Ann Marie night sampling in Ischia, Italy.

Dr. Grottoli and graduate student Ann Marie Hulver collecting seawater samples in Ischia.

Heading out to collect zooplankton

Cladocora caespitosa

Astreoides calycularis

CO2 vent site, Ischia, Italy

Heading out to collect corals on a chilly day in Ischia, Italy.

Grad student Ann Marie Hulver collecting seawater beside the corals in Ischia, Italy

Collecting Astreoides calicularis

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.