Just a Little Off the Top

Kirstin Meyer, a postdoctoral scholar at WHOI, holds an underwater note pad near a juvenile Porites lobata coral that she just sampled. You can see the little white area in the center of the coral where she and MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student Hanny Rivera extracted a small chunk of tissue. The two study how coral larvae disperse and settle in various places on the seafloor. They can analyze genes in the samples to compare how different coral populations in different locations may be related. The scientists photograph each coral sample once it has been extracted, and use the notepad to log them. (Photo by Kirstin Meyer, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)