Reproduction and Evolutionary Ecology-Fogarty Lab

It's finally time for a DLAB spawning update! 🎊

Between May 14th and 15th, we had 9 of our colonies spawn brining our total for this year up to 10 of 13 colonies! We produced five batch crosses between the two days with a total of approximately 542,000 larvae. We were able to send approximately 188,000 larvae to partners in Florida. After our experiments and shipments, we settled 3,753 recruits for future growout.

An undergraduate student, Katie Rowley, (mentored by PhD student Krista Laforest) received a UNCW SURCA grant to conduct a research project. Katie and Marrianna Alfonso (undergraduate student) were able to run a pilot of a fertilization success experiment over 2-hour timepoints and with different s***m concentrations. She used 1,200 total gamete bundles from four colonies and will be scoring fertilization success in her crosses soon! They plan to rerun this experiment in the second half of spawning season to incorporate some additional species!

Tyler Pratt (MS student) was able to run a first round on his tile conditioning duration and light intensity experiment to try to maximize larval settlement success. Tyler utilized the help of many of our volunteers to help count larvae and score his settlement. He will be using DNA sequencing to determine the diversity of bacterial biofilm he was able to culture on these tiles in addition to analyzing his settlement success data soon! Tyler also plans to rerun this experiment in the second half of spawning season.

Krista Laforest (PhD student) was also able to continue data collection on s***m motility and velocity in each of the individual DLAB colonies that spawned. Krista also used in different s***m concentrations in parallel to Katie and Marrianna's experiment to replicate the dilution factor of s***m as they travel further distances between colonies with future reef degradation. Krista has been working on the s***m motility and velocity project since August of 2024 and will continue to collect valuable data on our individual broodstock colonies that spawn each year. Their s***m motility and velocity can tell us a lot about their overall health and fertilization potential.

Mabuhay! Our CORDAP team returned to the Philippines last month to visit collaborators at UPMSI. Dr. Fogarty, Ellyn Darke (PhD Student), and our fellow grant partners attended a workshop in Manila with local scientists and stakeholders to foster conversation around the future of gene-editing in coral, mirrored to one hosted by our team in August. They then spent two weeks in Bolinao to help with coral spawning, and with the help of our former lab manager, Louis-Pierre Rich, they were able to install a lunar and solar lighting system to hopefully help colonies spawn more synchronously inside their hatchery! We are so grateful for the most gracious hosts and another successful trip to progress grant objectives!