Sloan Fellowship Will Help New Faculty Rachael Bay Understand How Marine Animals Respond to Warming Temperatures
Assistant Professor Rachael Bay, Department of Evolution and Ecology, learned to scuba dive far from the tropical environments conducive to coral reefs. She trained in a rock quarry located near Lake Erie in Ontario.
“All I remember is that it was very cold and very murky and I think I saw one fish the whole time,” recalled Bay. “But I really wanted to learn how to dive.”
Bay’s research and studies eventually took her to the coral reefs off Florida’s coast and in the lagoons of American Samoa and the Cook Islands in the South Pacific. As a Ph.D. student at Stanford University, she combined her interests in marine science and computational biology to study the genetics behind thermal tolerance in corals. These animal are highly sensitive to temperature shifts.
“We have pretty solid research saying that corals do acclimate to warmer temperatures,” said Bay, noting that corals exposed to non-life-threatening warm temperatures seem to acclimate better than those that haven’t been exposed to them. “That’s been shown many times in several different species, but we also know, by looking at the bleaching record, that repeated bleaching events seem more likely to lead to mortality.”