After more than five years in the Marine Biodiversity Lab as a PhD student and postdoctoral scholar, Dr. Lauren Lees has departed to pursue her next adventure as a USC Sea Grant Knauss Fellow working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Silver Spring, Maryland. We have appreciated her enthusiasm, help with fieldwork, expertise…

The first week in December brought two important transitions to our lab group. First, after five years in the lab, Samuel Bedgood defended his dissertation! His love of sea anemones, cheerful demeanor, and homemade Nutella-filled pretzels will be missed, but we wish him all the best in his postdoc in Integrative Biology at Oregon State.…

At a recent lab meeting, we compiled this list of UC Irvine campus resources that reflect and support our lab mission and values: Basic Needs Hub (https://basicneeds.uci.edu) Black Student Union at UCI (http://bsu-uci.weebly.com/) Campus Assault Resources & Education (CARE; https://care.uci.edu/) Child Care Services (https://childcare.uci.edu/) Counseling Center (https://counseling.uci.edu/) Cross-Cultural Center (http://ccc.uci.edu) Division of Career Pathways (https://career.uci.edu/)…

For our Ecology Group meeting today, we compiled a list of some resources for remote teaching in ecology and environmental sciences. It includes links to aquariums and museums with virtual exhibits, virtual field trips to national parks and sanctuaries, opportunities to participate in crowdsourced research, and resources for remote teaching and learning. I’m posting it…

Congratulations to Samuel Bedgood, whose undergrad thesis research on movement in sea anemones was just published in Marine Biology! In this paper, Samuel describes how food availability and temperature-induced changes in symbiont density in the sea anemone Exaiptasia diaphana influence crawling behavior, detachment from the substratum and reattachment in a new location, and increased production…

Laura defended her dissertation on August 23, just submitted it to the UCI library, and is now officially Dr. Elsberry! Laura’s PhD research evaluated changes in species associations, foundation species roles, and population demographics of organisms – especially seaweeds – along the California coast. She has already begun teaching ecology at California State University, Fullerton.…

Kelps – large brown seaweeds in the Order Laminariales – are emerging as an important mariculture crop in Alaska. Matt, who grew up in Alaska, was recently interviewed for an article in The Guardian, and he described environmental effects, potential for carbon dioxide absorption, and advances in understanding seaweed life cycles.

Hakai magazine recently profiled Matt’s work describing how northern feather duster worms, which build strong tubes from sediment and slime, provide habitat for kelp to attachment. Kelp, large brown algae which provide important food and habitat for many marine organisms, typically need to grow on rocky bottoms. However, Matt found them growing on a mudflat,…

We have transitioned from monitoring tide pools to setting up our experiments to evaluate the top-down vs. bottom-up roles of herbivores as mediators of primary productivity. We set up herbivore-exclusion fences at our Southern California sites this week and will head north to Central and Northern California later this month. Well done, team!