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That is a Spat

November 29, 2018

All coral colonies start off as a single newly settled polyp, or “spat.” This single polyp grows and divides asexually into thousands of clonal polyps that form a colony. Hanny Rivera, a recent graduate graduate in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, extended her Ph.D. research on Palauan corals by examining whether resilient corals on so-called “Super Reefs” could disperse their young to other reefs and help those reefs recover following a disturbance. Rivera uses DNA to determine how closely related, or “genetically connected,” corals from different reefs are to one another. (Photo by Hanny Rivera, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)