Nicole Nakata

Nicole has compiled diet records from a range of literature sources, as well as our own unpublished data, for over 400 species. She is performing phylogenetically controlled analyses to test for ecological caps on diversification in Sacoglossa due to the diversity of algal hosts used by a lineage, as well as tests of how slug or algal traits influence diversification rate over macroevolutionary time.

​

Nicole came to the lab from Yale, where as an undergraduate she studied the phylogenetics of lanternfish. During her M.S. she participated in a field expedition to sample the sacoglossan diversity of Maui, Hawaii. She is currently completing her M.S. thesis while a