Coral in New England? Yes, And It’s Rugged – College of the Holy Cross

In May, McAlister and Kelly Wolfe-Bellin, senior lecturer and director of biology laboratories, led a team of students from various academic disciplines to Bermuda to investigate and consider how societies and communities manage energy, water, food, waste management, nature, conservation, and environmental changes.

The students had to think about the decisions or tradeoffs that needed to be made about how resources would be generated and used. Those decisions might be different on a small island like Bermuda than what they would be coming from a big country like the U.S., he noted.

As a researcher, McAlister studies how natural and man-made environmental changes impact the biology and life history decisions made by organisms. Specifically, what these changes mean for marine invertebrates and their larvae, including classic sea creatures like cnidarians (corals, sea anemones and jellyfish) and echinoderms (sea urchins, sea stars and brittle stars).

When thinking about what is more important in controlling how an organism develops and grows, it used to be a battle between nature versus nurture, he said. Its actually both things together that lead to the development of the organism. That's true for humans just as much as it is true for every other organism.

An example of a brittle star.

While conducting doctoral research in Panama, he focused on species of echinoderms that lived in the Pacific Ocean and had cousins thriving in the Caribbean, separated only by about 50 miles of land and three million years of marine evolution. They experienced different food sources, water temperatures and predators, and had to make tradeoffs in order to survive: lay more and smaller eggs in the Pacific or fewer and larger more robust eggs in the Caribbean in order to thrive in their different marine environments. McAlister researched how the invisible-to-the-naked-eye larvae adapted to the changes.

When I talk to people about sea stars they have this mental image of an adult sea star. Thats not what the babies look like. They look like aliens, are microscopic and more sensitive [to environmental change] than the adults, and float around in the ocean water [instead of crawling along the seafloor]. Nobody's thinking about them, except for the few of us that do, McAlister said.

That is until there is a marine catastrophe, like warming oceans or a pollution event. Its the babies that are often killed off or most affected, McAlister said.

A jellyfish larvae moves through collected seawater.