How did you get invited to collect corals aboard the R/V Nancy Foster?

Getting to go out on one of these NOAA research cruises is an incredible opportunity as a young scientist. My advisor during my master’s program at Georgia Southern University, Dr. Daniel Gleason, has a long-standing collaboration with Gray’s Reef to complete research on the sessile benthic community at the Sanctuary. Each summer, researchers from all over the country, along with Gray’s Reef staff, spend days to weeks doing surveys of fish and invertebrates across the 22 square miles of the Sanctuary. While I worked on my M.S. degree in Dr. Gleason’s lab, I was able to spend time each summer helping with this research. In fact, this is my second research cruise on the R/V Nancy Foster!

Thankfully for me, the invertebrate survey team was a member short this year so they invited me back to help out. I also worked with Gray’s Reef’s Research Coordinator, Kimberly Roberson, to get a permit to collect samples of soft corals in the Sanctuary for my own coral microbial research!

Why exactly were you collecting soft corals from Gray’s Reef?

Let’s use humans as an example. Our bodies are covered with microbes, both inside and out, and they do lots of good for us like digesting food and protecting us from pathogens. However, some of them aren’t so helpful and can cause stinky breath or give us infections.

Just like us, corals have a whole community of microbes that live on them. We’ve been able to learn a lot about these microbes, but there is still so much that is unknown. For example, we don’t know if each different species of coral has specific types of microbes associated with it, or if changes to the environment can cause the microbes to change either in type or abundance. We don't know if these microbes are doing helpful or harmful things to the coral. Most of what we do know comes from work done on tropical hard corals, but Gray’s Reef is not tropical, nor is it dominated by hard corals. Instead, the reefs there are temperate and the main corals are soft corals, and we know very little about coral microbes in this type of habitat.

Beyond determining basic information about the microbes associated with corals at Gray’s Reef (which microbes are present and how many of them are there in each coral), the other goal is to figure out exactly what function these microbes have and how they might impact coral health and survival. Microbes react quickly to environmental changes, much more quickly than the coral itself. If we can determine what the microbial community of a healthy coral should look like versus that of an unhealthy coral, in the future we may be able to use that information to give us insight into the overall health of a reef before the coral show visible signs of degradation. This type of information is invaluable in a constantly changing global environment where reefs of all types are threatened.

On this expedition I was able to collect eight different species of coral - seven species that I was expecting to find and one that we’ve never documented at Gray’s Reef before! We have a fairly good idea of what this new species is, but it’s important to confirm this using both DNA (genetical material) and a morphological assessment. I will be working on that over the next couple of months to hopefully identify this newcomer and figure out how/why we are seeing this particular coral in Gray’s Reef this year.