KRUG LAB - EVOLUTIONARY AND LARVAL ECOLOGY OF MARINE INVERTEBRATES
PATRICK J. KRUG
Professor of Biological Sciences,
Cal State Los Angeles
Thank you for visiting my research lab homepage. Follow the links above to explore the work my students, colleagues and I do investigating the processes that generate marine biodiversity, and our efforts to describe and name unrecognized diversity in one group of sea slugs.
We study the ecological and evolutionary consequences of:
(1) dispersal and population connectivity mediated by planktonic larvae
(2) host specialization by marine herbivores
(3) photosynthesis within animal cells, via chloroplast retention
​
Moving from ecological to macroevolutionary timescales, we examine how such processes affect divergence among populations, speciation, and the diversification of lineages. ​Our primarily model system is Sacoglossa, a clade of over 300 species of sea slugs. Some species are kleptoplastic, retaining functional chloroplasts from their host algae within their bodies. Most species feed on only one algal genus. Dispersal polymorphisms, rare in most marine animals, occur in a number of sacoglossans.
