On the first time I emailed a real coral scientist

There is a particular kind of nervous you only feel writing to someone whose work you've actually read. Not someone famous, exactly. Someone who knows a thing you want to know, and who has spent more years than you've been alive learning it.

I had been reading a paper by Dr. Joshua Madin about how staghorn corals recover after bleaching events. I read it twice. The first time I didn't understand half of it. The second time I understood maybe sixty percent and felt that this was a victory worth celebrating with a cup of tea.

Then I did the thing that I had been planning to do for about three weeks and not doing. I opened my email and wrote to him.

I don't think I really expected a reply. I just wanted to find out what it felt like to send one.

The email took an hour. I deleted my first draft because it was too long and tried too hard. I deleted my second draft because it was too short and felt like I was pretending I wasn't nervous. The third one was just honest.

to: j.madin@aims.gov.au
from: indra@indramagesh.com
subject: a question about your 2024 staghorn paper

Dear Dr. Madin,

I'm a 17-year-old in Tasmania who hopes to study marine biology at UTAS in 2028. I read your paper "Coral resilience under repeat thermal stress" twice this week. I have a question I couldn't find the answer to in the paper itself.

You showed that some staghorn colonies recover faster after a second bleaching event than after the first. Is that learned at the colony level — like the colony is somehow primed — or is it just that the weakest colonies died in the first event, and what's left is selected for resilience?

I might be missing something obvious. I'm sorry if I am.

Thank you for reading this,
Indra

Then I waited. And while I waited I did something I think every young person who is sending their first cold email does, which is to immediately decide that the email was terrible, that I had used the word "obvious" wrong, that my question was stupid, and that I would never send another one again.

He replied four days later. Two paragraphs. He said the question wasn't stupid. He said the answer was "almost certainly both, in proportions we can't yet untangle." He told me the name of a colleague whose PhD work was exactly this question, and he said I should write to her too.

The most important lesson of my year so far is not that he replied. It's that I sent it. Most of the emails I send won't get replies. That's the deal. The deal is that you send them anyway, because the only way to find out which ones reply is to send them. Almost everything good that happens to me this year is going to start with an email I almost didn't send.