In July 2019, the Baum Lab completed our 15th expedition to Kiritimati led again by Kristina Tietjen, the project manager.
We once again surveyed fish, sampled our tagged adult coral colonies, sampled the coral recruitment tiles, collected photos for community composition, and photographed the reef and coral colonies for 3D models. This summer we also collected fish for stable isotope analysis to compare the food web structure from before and after the El Niño. The fish collection was also in collaboration with the Wood Lab at the University of Washington. The fish were dissected for their parasite contents and post doc Danielle Claar is analyzing that data. We continued to see signs of reef recovery around the island with many juvenile corals popping up and partially dead corals growing again. There also has not been any evidence of a switch to macroalgae dominated reefs. We are excited to watch how this recovery progresses with our fingers crossed that there is not another heat wave any time soon. We are now working hard to process the samples from all of the field seasons that the lab conducted in the past few years and we are looking forward to sharing our results with you in the near future. Contact Julia (baum 'at' uvic.ca) or Kristina (kiritimatiprojectmanager 'at' gmail.com) for more information. For more information about our lab head over to our lab website: juliakbaum.org Follow us on Twitter: @baumlab and @tietjenk or check out #kiritimati2019 |