When Drew Bouchie (CAS’24) and his classmates enrolled in “Marine Physiology and Climate Change,” as part of the Boston University Marine Program (BUMP) “Marine Semester” in November 2023, they had no idea it would lead to a published study.
When Drew Bouchie (CAS’24) and his classmates enrolled in “Marine Physiology and Climate Change,” as part of the Boston University Marine Program (BUMP) “Marine Semester” in November 2023, they had no idea it would lead to a published study.
For two weeks, Bouchie and three classmates crowded into a small dark closet in the basement of the Biology Research Building, wearing headlamps, balancing on step stools, and typing on laptops sitting precariously atop coral tanks. Their assignment was to see how corals reacted to changes in heat.“It was my first time being on a project from start to finish,” said Bouchie, who majored in Earth & Environment and minored in Marine Biology. “We put them in these tanks, raised the temperature every day. We held it at an elevated temperature to simulate a heatwave. And we observed the corals.”
The students didn’t know when they started the class, but the assignment was part of a larger research experiment led by Jeric “JK” Da-Anoy, a recent PhD graduate of the Davies Marine Population Genomics Lab. That study, published this summer in the journal Science Advances, revealed a trade-off in one of coral reefs’ most important survival strategies.
Read more at: Boston University
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