Jan, Ira, Sophie and Kat attended the International Coral Reef Society conference in Auckland, and we had research to share from Mikhail, Nadja and Sunny as well. Despite a near disaster with posters attempting to escape on the way we all got there in one piece and presented our work across four talks and three posters.

Kat presented her epic work, estimating dispersal rates across dozens of coral taxa. Ira gave a talk about how our new and improved data is giving us much deeper insights on old results in Acropora kenti. He also gave a speed talk on Sunny’s work showing the endemicity of this species at Yunbenun (Magnetic Island). Sophie gave a super nice presentation on her method to isolate symbiont DNA from coral eggs. Nadja’s genome got a lot of attention with her eye-catching poster and the implications of centromeres also mentioned in Ira’s talk. Mikhail’s two posters were also crowded with lots of interested people discussing the results.

We also made lots of new connections and managed to catch up with lots of friends, including Roger from Japan and Youfang who has attended many Marine Omics meetings on zoom but who we still hadn’t met in person.