First, Maria Koytcheva at the microscope is a high school senior at Winston Churchill HS. She contacted me about becoming an intern earlier this year. I didn't have anything I could suggest as a research project, but she was willing instead to work on creating a digital index of the Scleractinia collection. That Excel file will help us plan the move of the collection down to our newly renovated dry collection storage room this fall. The collection is currently split into 4 sub-collections; Indo-Pacific reef corals, Atlantic reef corals, ahermatypic Scleractinians and fossil aherms. To top it off, each of these sub-collections is arranged differently. When we move the collection, all of those sub-collections will be "knitted" back into one collection, arranged to facilitate access by someone not cognizant of the phologenetic/taxonomic order of the Scleractinia.
Second, John Tschirky and Herman Wirshing are studying subsamples of Belizean soft corals and sea fans in the lab today. John has maintained a live 100 meter transect at Carrie Bow Cay for 30 years, recording everything about the octocorals growing along the transect.
Those that are not so easily identified in situ have been subsampled to facilitate their identification. Herman, our DNA tech., is very experienced with Caribbean octocorals and is working with John to get names on his specimens. Today, they are making sclerite preparations, which are key in making confident identifications.
I told Maria to feel free to engage herself in what John and Herman are working on today. She will learn how to make a sclerite preparation and see the results under the compound microscope. Last week, Herman showed her how to subsample some bubblegum corals (Paragorgia) for DNA extraction. Paragorgia is a genus with very large polyps easily seen without magnification. Herman showed her the various components of an octocoral polyp, such as the tentacles, where sclerites are best found that are specific for making identifications.
by Tim Coffer
