About
In a former life as a freelance photographer, I became increasingly interested in the natural beauty of marine macroalgae during trips to the shore. I began using seaweeds as subject matter in cyanotype images in similar ways that naturalists like Anna Atkins had done over 150 years ago. This fed into my naturalist’s curiosity regarding the complex ecology in the intertidal zone where organisms are subjected to daily fluctuations in temperature and nutrients, predation, and competition. Now, my interests broadly relate to life history evolution and how these adaptations function to provide mechanisms for organisms to persist as members in complex intertidal communities.
I am currently focusing on a group of red seaweeds that have evolved to abandon photosynthesis and parasitize their closest evolutionary neighbors (adelphoparasitism). My interests here are principally related to the developmental similarities between the adelphoparasite and host life history stages, and how these evolutionary adaptations are conserved across red seaweeds In other words: what can change and which aspects of life history are constrained when an organism abandons a free-living life style? In a related project concerning organellar (plastid and mitochondrion) maintenance, we are looking into the evolutionary trajectories of genes that have been transferred to the nucleus but still function in organelles.
In the investigation we propose here, I feel that the information gathered here by citizen scientists and analyzed by us will provide exciting insight into how adaptation effects the success or failure of organisms invading new territory (and I think it will be a ton of fun!)
Joined
July 2013
