Updates on Lab Work

This project is one my advisor and I have been dreaming up since I started graduate school, and currently is my first chapter of my PhD dissertation! The motivation for this experiment started with my interest in thermal acclimation and how corals may be able to use acclimation as a tool to adapt to the changing climate. After about the first week into graduate school, my advisor asked "What are you interested in?" and I thought for a second and perked up and said "Acclimation!".  It was always something I was curious about, and now that I had the ability to ask my own research question and dream up my own experiments, I knew this was the topic I wanted to focus on. 

Thermal acclimation is a concept used to consider how temperature shifts may influence an organism's response, particularly examining the plasticity of the organism to perform with respect a given temperature. For corals, we usually think of the acclimation temperature as right below a temperature that causes coral bleaching, or a "bleaching threshold". Imagine if we drew a line on a thermometer at around 32C or 90F. If the ocean temperature were at or above this line, then most corals would bleach. But below this line, corals tend not to bleach. So when corals sit at a temperature below that bleaching threshold, say at 29C or 84F for some time period, and then all of a sudden become exposed to a temperature above that threshold, corals have acclimated and therefore don't bleach. 

Well, many scientific studies show just that; thermal acclimation at a slightly warmer temperature assists coral survival when exposed to very hot temperatures. But the question in my mind (and hopefully yours, too!) is how does this happen? What allows the coral to become acclimated, and is this mechanism present in all corals? Well, that's where my PhD research is headed, and particularly with this experiment. I'm interested in asking questions about the mechanisms of thermal acclimation and what differences and similarities lie between various coral species. This experiment focuses on comparing responses in 9 Pacific coral species and examines how the coral host is responding, as well as the coral's algal symbiont living within the coral host's tissue. 

This project will be one of the largest comparative studies to date and will provide novel information about how thermal acclimation may feed into future coral adaptation. If you fund my project, I will be able to examine differences in coral species to provide some insight in coral adaption.