KRUG LAB - EVOLUTIONARY AND LARVAL ECOLOGY OF MARINE INVERTEBRATES
April 27, 2020
Congratulations to M.S. student Paige Weiss for being awarded a COAST graduate student research award, which will support her ongoing research in chemical ecology!
April 15, 2020
Congratulations to undergraduate research student Kanique Thomas, who was awarded a pretidgious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to support three years of doctoral research. Nicky was the only Cal State L.A. undergrad to receive an NSF GRF award in 2020. She will defer for a year to complete a post-baccalaureate program at the National Institutes of Health before starting her Ph.D.
April 02, 2020
Our newly described species of egg-eating sea slug, Olea hensoni, was named one of the Top Ten new marine species discovered in 2019 by WoRMS, the World Record of Marine Species. This website maintains a record of all named species in the world's oceans. Remarkably, the species next to O. hensoni on the list of remarkable new species for 2019 was a bioluminescent crustacean discovered by a team including our departmental colleague Lisa Torres.
June 18, 2019
Former visiting scholar from Brazil, Hilton Galvao Filho, was lead author on our study describing a new species of egg-eating sea slug, Olea hensoni. The species was named after Jim Henson, creator of the muppets, who educated and entertained generations of children while they ate their eggs for breakfast. Just one lineage among the herbivorous sacoglossans switched to egg eating and lost the green color of their kin; like Kermit the Frog once sang, sometimes "it's not that easy bein' green".. To learn more, check out this excellent story about the discovery and our study from the Florida Museum of Natural History, with interviews by coauthors and great pictures of the animals.
October 16, 2018
National Geographic online featured our work describing a new genus (Sacoproteus) and four new species of sea slugs that mimic the "killer algae" they eat, with interviews by coauthors and colleagues; the article includes great pictures and videos of the animals by collaborator Leena Wong from Malaysia. This study was one of the most downloaded articles of 2018 in the journal Zoologica Scripta.
July 23, 2018
I'm interviewed by National Geographic for a story about how disappearing sea slugs impede scientific study of kleptoplasty - in this case, how the rarity of the highly photosynthetic species Elysia chlorotica has slowed down scientific progress into understanding how it can survive many months without feeding through acquired photosynthetic ability.
June 22, 2018
Congrats to Melanie Medina, winner of Best Graduate Student talk at the joint meeting of the American Malacological Society and Western Society of Malacology in Honolulu, Hawaii! Lab members Lisa Lugo and Andre LaBuda gave poster presentations, and I took over as president of WSM - looking forward to my reign of terror, leading up next year's spectacular meeting in Asilomar, CA.
April 09, 2018
Former M.S. student Hanna Koch completed her Ph.D. from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany and recently secured a fellowship to fund postdoctoral research at the Elizabeth Moore International Center for Coral Reef Research & Restoration in the Florida Keys. Hanna will be studying the potential for adaptive evolutionary response in reef-building corals to climate change. Our paths crossed in her first week back when we visited the Moore lab to collect sea slugs!
April 23, 2018
Congratulations to M.S. student and LSAMP fellow Melanie Medina, who was accepted into the Ph.D. program in marine biology at Florida State University to work with Dr. Don Levitan, one of the world's leading authorities on sexual selection in marine invertebrates, Melanie's driving intellectual interest. We are very excited for her, as she joins lab alum Jackson Powell at FSU this fall.
March 07, 2018
Undergrad researcher and Honor's College member Andrew Wong will be going to Cornell to study veterinary medicine in the fall after graduation, hoping to specialize in exotic animals (like sea slugs??) Congrats to Andrew for getting into one of the nation's top vet programs!
February 14, 2018
M.S. student Andre LaBuda received one of only two awarded Libbie Hyman scholarships (out of 20 applications received) from the Society for Integrative & Comparative Biology. The award will fund his fieldwork this summer in Hawaii, testing the ecological benefits of kleptoplasty in photosynthetic sea slugs. He also received a grant from the Conchologists of America to support his field season.
February 12, 2018
Former M.S. student Demian Willette accepted an offer for a tenure-track faculty position in biology at Loyola Marymount University here in Los Angeles, where he has been teaching for several years while pursuing his research in applied marine ecology. He was recently named a Fulbright Global Scholar and has led studies of seafood mislabeling and fisheries management in the Philippines and Ecuador, as well as locally.
January 25, 2018
We received a Research Experience for Undergraduates supplement to my existing NSF grant from the Division for Environmental Biology to support 6 months of mentored research by continuing student Jermaine Bishop, who is identifying and describing cryptic species of Placida in collaboration with other students in the Krug lab.
January 07, 2018
I presented a talk on the last day of the 2018 annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in San Francisco, co-authored by M.S. student Nicole Nakata on her thesis research, and by former postdoc Ryan Ellingson, on comparative analyses of consumer-trait coevolutionary dynamics. Great to see visit with colleagues including the Grosberg lab, Julia Sigwart, Kevin Kocot, Sarah Cohen, Rachel Collin and many others.
August 28, 2017
I started my fall sabbatical! Thanks to my Dean and Provost for supporting this break to focus on writing up manuscripts featuring the work of current and former students, and ongoing research collaborations.
August 18, 2017
I was awarded my university's Outstanding Professor Award, together with five colleagues; thank you to my colleagues on the selection committee for conferring this honor, and to Alan Bloom for his outstanding documentaries that brought our histories and work alive for the convocation crowd.
August 17, 2017
I presented a talk at the international Larval Biology meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii. On this trip I also spent time doing data analysis with the Marshall lab from Monash University, and collected sea slugs with Ph.D. candidate Rachel Wade of the University of Hawaii, on whose dissertation committee I serve.
June 30, 2017
Five members of the lab gave presentations at the Western Society of Malacology annual meeting at the L.A. Natural History Museum. I was, inexplicably, voted President-elect of the society when I accidentally attended the business meeting and Doug Eernisse set a trap for me; the vote was nearly unanimous, with one vote against (cast by me).
January 17, 2017
The sitcom New Girl featured a character celebrating a new species of sea slug being named after him - “Bruce’s eastern sea slug.” Watched by 2.4 million viewers, this gag was evidently inspired by my segments on L.A. NPR discussing sea slug taxonomy. Watch at 2.40 minute mark in the associated video, or in the short clip where Zooey Deschanel corrects her friend, "SEA slugs, Reagan; they're SEA slug guys."
August 08, 2016
Together with former postdoctoral fellow Dr. Jann Vendetti and collaborator Dr. Angel Valdes, we published a monograph revising the genus Elysia from the Caribbean, including descriptions of 6 new species - notably, one named E. christinae after my grandmother, and another E. pawliki after colleague Joe Pawlik.
July 25, 2016
M.S. students Ariel Sherman and Nicole Nakata took summer classes at Friday Harbor Laboratories in Washington State; Ariel studied Advanced Invertebrate Zoology under Kevin Kocot, and Nicole studied Larval Biology with Richard Emlet and Danny Grunbaum.
June 30, 2016
Seven members of the Krug and Valdes labs completed a collecting expedition to Maui, including M.S. students Jessika DeJesus and Nicole Nakata and postdoc Ryan Ellingson. Specimens of many undescribed or taxonomically ambiguous species were collected for ongoing systematic research.
June 16, 2016
Four members of the lab, including undergraduate Jackson Powell, M.S. student Jaymes Awbrey, and postdoc Ryan Ellingson, gave talks at the American Malacological Society meeting in Ensenada, Mexico.
April 25, 2016
Undergraduate research student Jackson Powell has been accepted into the Ph.D. program in marine biology at Florida State University where he will be working under the supervision of Dr. Scott Burgess starting in the fall. Congrats to Jackson!
April 25, 2016
Undergraduate research student and member of our Honor's College Juliana Lawrence will be attending Yale medical school next fall. Congrats to Juliana!
April 01, 2016
Congrats to M.S. student Jaymes Awbrey for choosing the Ph.D. program at Louisiana State University at Lafayette to continue his graduate training in the fall in systematics of octocorals!
January 04, 2016
Former M.S. student and current postdoctoral scholar Dr. Ryan Ellingson and I published a paper today that was featured on the cover of Evolution, showing that dispersive larvae have repeatedly and recently been lost from four populations of the Caribbean sea slug Costasiella ocellifera, causing those populations to become genetically depauperate and reproductively isolate; in contrast, most populations remain genetically connected via larval dispersal.
November 01, 2015
Our paper featuring five current or former lab members and international collaborators was published on the cover of Systematic Biology, challenging 40 years of studies asserting that species selection favors non-dispersive larval development; we showed that in sea slugs, dispersive life histories benefit from species selection, causing speciation to exceed extinction rates.
August 10, 2015
Colleagues Angel Valdes, Ryan Ellingson and I taught an intensive 2-week workshop on marine heterobranch ecology, taxonomy, and systematics to a group of international students and postdocs at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Station in Bocas del Toro, Panama; participants came from all over Latin America, the U.S., and from as far away as India. The course yielded a number of new species, and all participants co-authored a paper together.