See Video We’re back in the Big Apple. Sadly, we left Moorea the day before the big performance by the “Tahitian Elvis” in one of the hotels. But we were happy to know that we collected a large amount of data for analysis. For the last few days of our field expedition, we were extremely [...]

On Moorea, we’re finding sea creatures in the strangest places.

Queens College’s Michael Hickerson and students arrive on Moorea .

PAPEETE, Tahiti | It is 7 am in Papeete, and the sunrise is beautiful, the smells are relaxing and for some reason I have a random Kinks song stuck in my head. Down here in the southern hemisphere, it is wintertime and the equatorial sun sets at 6 pm (all too early), with no angular lingering. After 14 hours on two planes and a six-hour time difference, my three students and I forced ourselves to stay up until 10 in order to get in synch with the local time zone. We sauntered through the grimy streets to the waterfront food carts and had ourselves some steak, frites, and tuna kabobs. Papeete is the largest city in French Polynesia—actually, it’s the only city in French Polynesia. We are really as far as you can get from all continental reach, which puts us roughly equidistant from Australia, the Americas and Antarctica.

Tomorrow, I depart with three biology students for the French Polynesian island of Moorea. Paul Gauguin went to the island next door–the larger and better known Tahiti–to paint. We are going to Moorea and its surrounding waters as part of an international project to examine the entire biological community at the DNA level. Specifically, at [...]