Learning the Ropes

I saw my juvenile coral today!

Sam (my mentor) and I took images and sacrificed the coral polyps that had matured over 6 weeks.

The two tan/brown circles on the right circled by pencil are the spat.

I learned how to identify and carefully take pictures of the coral through a microscope.  This will later be measured through an image processing program so we can compare images of the coral taken at 10 days, 4 weeks, and finally at 6 weeks too see how much they have grown.  Coral grows so slowly that it would take about twenty years for this coral to grow to the size of a baseball!