KRUG LAB - EVOLUTIONARY AND LARVAL ECOLOGY OF MARINE INVERTEBRATES
Melissa Romero, M.S. 2009
Melissa studied factors controlling the expression of dispersing versus non-dispersing larvae in Alderia willowi. In clutches of short-lived lecithotrophic larvae, a variable percentage metamorphose shortly after hatching regardless of their environment, while their more selective siblings swim off and only settle to the bottom if they encounter the juvenile food alga Vaucheria. Melissa manipulated neurotransmitters to determine what pathway(s) controls habitat choice in these behaviorally distinct larval morphs. Increased levels of nitric oxide (NO) inhibited metamorphosis in newly hatched larvae. Higher NO levels did not cause metamorphosis in selective larvae, but did increase their sensitivity to settlement cues from their host algae, making them accept a weaker signal of habitat suitability.
see ​Romero et al. 2013, Journal of Experimental Biology
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Melissa also contributed to a 2nd paper from our lab about the environmental factors that control the expression of alternative larval morphs in Alderia willowi. She won a Sally Cassanova fellowship which partly supported two summers of research at the Friday Harbor Marine Laboratory, resulting in a publication co-authored with Dr. Richard Strathmann on particle capture by veliger larvae. She gave talks in 2009 at meetings of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology; ASLO Ocean Sciences in Niece, France; the Southern California Academy of Sciences; and the Western Society of Malacologists. Melissa was supported by a fellowship from the NSF-funded CEA-CREST center at CSULA.
Before joining the Krug lab, she previously worked on larval ecology as an undergraduate with Prof. Danielle Zacherl at Cal State Fullerton, where she became the first person ever to culture the larvae of the snail Kelletia kelletii through to metamorphosis -- an 8-week process!