Anderson Mayfield

Anderson Mayfield joined the AOML Coral Program team after an extended (11-year) sojourn in the Indo-Pacific, where he split his time between Southern Taiwan’s National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium and the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation’s (LOF) research vessel, the M.Y. Golden Shadow. At the former institute, Anderson both carried out global climate change (GCC) simulation experiments in coral reef “mesocosms” and developed molecular biological tools for assessing reef coral resilience, while his role with LOF was to attempt to document the health of thousands of corals sampled from French Polynesia to the Chagos Archipelago as part the “Global Reef Expedition” (the largest coral reef survey ever undertaken). Anderson is now attempting to use the molecular biotechnological protocols and coral “stress test” assays he developed in Asia with corals from the 1) AOML Coral Program’s GCC manipulation experiments and 2) South Florida reef tract (particularly reefs that have been found previously by AOML Coral Program team members to span a gradient of resilience, from highly heat tolerant to extremely sensitive to environmental perturbations). Anderson’s ultimate goal is to create means of predicting coral health on a pre-death timescale such that coral reef “triage” could be enacted in situ, thereby aiding in coral reef management strategies in the Anthropocene.