We’re swamped, snowed under, literally swallowed up by a few coral’s worth of microorganisms. 
We’re isolating them from coral mucus (aka coral snot) – a mucopolysaccharide layer that covers the the coral surface. The mucus was collected a few weeks ago from several reefs off the southern coast of Puerto Rico. We inoculated agar plates with mucus from three different coral species (from both healthy and diseased corals of each species) - these agar plates were then expressed mailed to our lab in Charleston. Then Katherine - with Nan's help, a little bit of Ben's and 
now Maria's (and even myself on ocassion) have been working on isolating the different microorganisms to purity. When I say "working" I mean pretty much working nonstop, to the point that a little amendment to our lab's sign has appeared which states "We never sleep."
Now, some of the colors of the microbial colonies are sorta fun, but what I'm not 
showing you is the hundred's of microbial isolates that might be the same thing, or
might not be. We won't know until we sequence them to find out exactly what they are - so we won't know for awhile. In the meantime, we keep going. There
are two questions in all of this that haunt me. The first one: Are our
isolation methods, which are definitely limiting for environmental strains of
bacteria, going to allow us to detect differences in the microbial communities between species? Or will we have to rely on molecular approaches alone? Thus far, I would say that we are seeing differences between the organisms we isolated from the different corals, and even between the healthy and diseased corals of the same species (especially for the gorgonian coral). So I am hopeful that all of this effort will be fruitful.
However my second question is a bit different: Is what we are doing worth exhausting people that work in my laboratory? On one hand, corals are an extremely threatened marine ecosystem, and the microbial diversity associated with these corals will change (or even be lost) as coral reefs are degraded. I can therefore say that I do feel that this is an important research direction. But to the point of exhaustion? I'm not so sure.
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