KRUG LAB - EVOLUTIONARY AND LARVAL ECOLOGY OF MARINE INVERTEBRATES
Diane Rico
Diane taught science for eight years at Venice High School, after graduating with a BS in biology from UC Santa Cruz in 2000. For her M.S. thesis, Diane performed a phylogenetically corrected analysis of how larval dispersal potential affects population connectivity and phylogeography across the Caribbean for 16 species of sea slugs that differ in their pelagic larval period
(PLD), which is when migration among islands primarily occurs in benthic
marine animals. She tested the long-standing theory that species with long-lived, feeding larvae (planktotrophy; PLD = ~30 days) would have greater gene flow and connectivity than species with short-lived swimming larvae (pelagic lecithotrophy; PLD = 1-12 days) or encapsulated metamorphosis (PLD = 0). Although several recent meta-analyses found little to no relationship between PLD and metrics of genetic structure like Fst, Diane found strong support for theory predicting larval type influences
population genetic structure among species.
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By analyzing realized gene flow across species of herbivorous sea slugs, Diane was also able to test biophysical models that predict patterns of larval exchange based on ocean currents. Barriers to gene flow did not occur where predicted by models and were highly idiosyncratic among species, although Florida appeared to be genetically isolated from the Caribbean in many species.
Diane was awarded a fellowship through the MORE programs at CSULA, and after completeing her M.S., entered a Ph.D. program at the University of Washington studying biological oceanography and phytoplankton biology.
Note: The species identified as "Elysia papillosa" in this thesis is now idenfied as Elysia patina; see Krug et al. 2016. Oxynoe antillarum haplogroups A and B are now recognized as distinct species (Berriman et al. 2018), as is Costasiella nonatoi haplogroup A.