Shayle Matsuda

After about half an hour, the wave action will cause them to burst.

Their little tiny eggs inside will float, and the sperm will start to sink.

And in the next day or so, there will be swimming coral larvae, these little itty-bitty jelly beans.

And then those larvae will then swim around and look for some suitable substrate to metamorphose into the first polyp, which will hopefully grow into many to form the next colony.

We didn't get a lot of spawning in June.

Usually we see it like June, July, August.

And since we didn't see a lot in June, we thought, you know, maybe this will be our big month.

And so going out of last night, we decided to just like take a quick look on the bay, see what we saw.

And there was a pretty big event.

So that kind of, you know, being a coral biologist, you have to be kind of ready to respond to whatever's going to happen.

So we kind of changed our plans and we'll go out and, you know, see what we can do.

And this is a great time for us because

a lot of the questions we have about early life stages, we can only ask during the summer months.

And so right now, this is a really exciting way for us to get a lot of genetic diversity and to run some of these preconditioning tests to see if you cool them down, if you heat them up, what's that going to do to their settlement or survivorship.

Yeah, yeah.

The technology that we use for DNA sequencing is one end of the spectrum.

And then on the ground in the lab is very, like,

DIY, grab some buckets.

We make these big scoops out of these plastic shoe boxes where we cut windows and hot glue on mesh, kind of use those to scoop out the bundles, carefully put them into little containers where they do the fertilization.

And then oftentimes, we'll even just leave them to sit overnight in buckets and then carefully clean them out the next morning.