Australia Coral Spawning - 2023

This year's team of Phillip Cleves, Amanda Tinoco, and Emily Meier traveled from Baltimore, MD to Townsville, QLD to study coral!

En route to Australia!

We arrived at the Australian Institute of Marine Science and prepared for a busy coral spawning season.

The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS).

A coral husbandry room at AIMS National Sea Simulator.

Coral spawning was a go! The corals spawned for 9 days, which meant many experiments and microinjections.

Acroporid coral set and starting to spawn.

Acroporid eggs under the injection stereoscope.

In all, we injected 4 species of Acroporids and amassed 91 96-well plates worth of heat stress experiments!

Amanda and Emily after cataloging all of the heat stress experiment plates. That's a wrap on coral spawning 2023!

It was a lot of work, and we were fortunate to have a cohesive, hard-working, and collaborative team of people to make this all possible. With the busy spawning experiments concluded, Amanda and Emily celebrated with a beach stroll!

Amanda and Emily at the beach after coral spawning,

Amanda and Emily spent some well-earned time at the Whitsundays after the coral spawning work.

Amanda strolling along Whitehaven Beach.

Now to process all the data! Stay tuned for the results.

Photos by AT and EKM.