Latest News

Happy Halloween! Today our paper came out in Science Advances showing that sea slugs can be frighteningly abundant: over 11,000 per m2 at some times in California! Slugs produce five new polyketide compounds that make them smell and taste repellant to predators, and when abundant, can scare diverse infaunal organisms right out of the mud.. but attract egg-laying snails to the haunted zones of empty mud. Check out how slug slime alters wetland ecology through these candidate "keystone molecules" - small compounds that hit above their weight in influence!    

A new recirculating aquarium system made possible by the College of Natural & Social Sciences and federal HEERF funding is now online. Both chilled and warmed sea water can be supplied to tanks for culturing and holding live specimens. Special thanks to graduate students Ben, Shelby and Morgana for helping relaunch this important resource for education and research!

As AMS president, Pat was delighted to organize and host the 90th American Malacological Society annual meeting, held jointly with the 57th meeting of the Western Society of Malacology (WSM) and the 7th International Heterobranch Workshop (IHW)! We met from 4-7 August 2024 at the Hilton Pasadena hotel and conference center. Highlights included an all-day workshop on kleptobiology and photosymbiosis; the auction which raised over $3,000 to support student travel; the AMS Presidential symposium, with six featured speakers from a range of career stages; and symposia on marine and terrestrial heterobranchs. We had 130 participants, and are exceptionally grateful for the financial support of AMS, CSU-COAST, NSF-IOS, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation!  

Congratulations to Jackson Powell, who defended his Ph.D. disseration today from Florida State University! Jackson studied the evolutionary ecology of marine invertebrates with Dr. Scott Burgess for his doctoral work - way to go meeting this huge milestone in your academic career, Jackson. And congratulations to recent graduate Anahy Garza who will be starting her Ph.D. studies at the University of Toronto - Mississauga with Dr. Kara Layton, on nudibranch phylogenomics, evolution and larval ecology!

Pat and colleague Angel Valdes traveled to the South Pacific island of New Caledonia, for a sea slug biodiversity discovery expedition organized by Dr. Philippe Bouchet of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturel of Paris. More than 25 local citizen-scientists donated their time, passion and expertise to collect sea slugs for our continuing studies. So far, six expeditions to different parts of New Caledonia have yielded approximately 1,800 species of marine heterobranchs - a staggering total. These expeditions are a testament to the incredible species richness of biodiversity hotspots, and show how much work we have to do to characterize unrecognized species currently lacking names or basic information on their ecology. Thankfully, our amazing colleagues in the citizen-science world continue to make invaluable contributions to ongoing research - we could NOT do this work without their partnership, experience, knowledge and generosity! Thank you all so much.  

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!

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.

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.

The story was also profiled by BBC Wildlife magazine and featured by the National Science Foundation Division of Environmental Biology.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

HHMI released updated educational materials for classroom use to illustrate key concepts in biology, based around my photographs of sacoglossans and information I supplied about kleptoplasty. These materials were first distributed in 2016.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

We received good coverage in the popular science media for our paper describing three new species of colorful sea slugs, including one named for former President Obama; the study had my colleague Angel Valdes as the senior author, and his student Jenny McCarthy as lead author.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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."

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.

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.

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.

Former postdoctoral research Dr. Jann Vendetti, now curator of malacology at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, became president of the Western Society of Malacology, and important professional society for the study of molluscs.

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.

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!

Undergraduate research student and member of our Honor's College Juliana Lawrence will be attending Yale medical school next fall. Congrats to Juliana!

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!

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.

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.

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.

My colleagues Erika Espinosa, Anne DuPont and Angel Valdes did me the ultimate honor of naming a new species of sacoglossan after me - Costasiella patricki, known from only one island in the Bahamas! Thank you for immortalizing me by weaving my name forever into sea slug taxonomy.