Microbial Production
Kate Hyder
2009 Stanford@SEA Collaborative Program Student
The view from my lab’s window at the Marine Biological Lab (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts was not quite as beautiful as the view I had during class every day on the Robert C. Seamans. But nothing I’ve ever experienced really compares to living on a 134-foot research vessel in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
My time at sea was the best educational experience I’ve had since entering college. Upon getting on the Seamans in Tahiti, I was actively pushing my brain and my body to do new things during my every (waking) second, whether I was engaged in taking water samples from 800 meters below deck, helping to change oil in the starboard generator, shooting stars, or just making myself aware of how the wind was filling out the new sail plan.
Learning about the ocean in a classroom is valuable for laying a foundation but it is difficult to develop a passion for something so inaccessible to most humans. SEA is a truly unique experience for undergraduates to cross over major oceanographic features, understanding them in a way that many specialists in related fields do not, while working closely with awesomely fun people and learning to love life and work on the ocean.
I considered myself the luckiest person onboard the Seamans, however, because my voyage with SEA wouldn’t end in Hawaii. On the first day of land classes, my chief scientist, Jan Witting, announced that there was a summer opportunity available only to the people in the room through Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU), a National Science Foundation program. I applied, drawn to the opportunity to extend and further delve into my onboard research on microbial production, and one month later I somehow found myself on the Seamans’ rescue boat navigating through a coral reef in Moorea. It was here, and at several other locations in the equatorial Pacific, that I collected water and the accompanying environmental data which I would then use to analyze microbial genetic diversity.
Fast-forward two months. Upon getting to Woods Hole, all the rules were different. The benchtop in the lab wasn’t rocking back and forth. I could sleep at night, in long and uninterrupted stretches. There was air-conditioning. One thing stayed the same, however: the water I was working with. Taking these precious samples from the collection and filtration stage through DNA extraction and amplification and more left me entirely invested in their story. My sense of ownership in the data I achieved extended far beyond my first day at MBL. As I looked over my sequences I thought back not only to all the hours running PCRs and gels, building databases in impossible phylogeny programs, but to the island of Moorea, its thriving coral reef and towering cliffs, and the beginning of the adventure.