A new way to visualize living corals: Corals under the confocal microscope.

I was one of the first few lucky people to get to look at these images under the amazing confocal microscope in Dr. Ruth Gate’s lab. This scanning laser confocal microscope uses the corals own fluorescent pigments to generate images of living coral, for the first time. My role was to help find cool things to look at! We have a collection permit from the State of Hawaiʻi to collect and study corals (corals are protected under state law), and many of these images were from corals that we have been doing genomic work on. We have a small aquarium in the lab and many of these corals are still growing.