Projects

A little background about Lophelia pertusa
Lophelia pertusa is a species of cold-water coral found in the deep sea. This species is a foundation species, which means that it is an ecosystem engineer that forms complex habitat in which other species live. There is evidence that L. pertusa may be associated with commercially important fish, especially as shallow water fisheries become depleted, and there are moves towards fishing in deeper water. L. pertusa is white when alive and is hard (it is referred to as a stony coral). When it dies, it turns brown and can remain standing while dead. However parts of it can break off and litter the ocean floor (this is known as rubble). This species is found at the bottom of the ocean in many parts of the world, where temperatures are in its physiological range of about 2-10 °C. This temperature range occurs at great depths at low latitudes (near the equator) and in slightly shallower water at higher latitudes (nearer to the poles).

Current Projects

Lophelia pertusa percent cover in the Viosca Knoll (August 2023 – Present)
I am investigating whether or not the amount of living Lophelia pertusa has changed over time in the Viosca Knoll (an oil leasing block) in the Gulf of Mexico. I am exploring this question by analyzing video footage from both archival and more recent videos taken with ROVs (remotely-operated vehicles) and HOVs (human-occupied vehicles). Long-term monitoring of our deep sea coral reef habitats is an early step in understanding the deep seas on this planet and the provision of food resources for humans into the future. Percent cover is a method of measuring how much Lophelia pertusa is present in a location at a given time (we measure how much of the ocean floor that we can see is made up of the coral). We cannot simply count the amount of Lophelia pertusa there are because they are a colonial species that are too dense, so counting them would be very time consuming.

Percent cover measurement methods (October 2023 – Present)
There is no standardized way to measure percent cover for Lophelia pertusa and for other encrusting species. My collaborators and I would like to review the methods that people are currently using to estimate percent cover of coral species, and compare the different methods for precision, accuracy, how long they take, etc, across videos of different quality and types to try to help other researchers pick a method that is best suited to their research.

Past Projects

Sphaerodactylus morphology (Summer 2023)
I was investigating if there was a relationship between the snout shape of geckolets in the Sphaerodactylus genus, and the humidity/precipitation of the environment in which they live.

Biogeographical modeling of Sphaerodactylus dispersal (Spring 2023)
I used BioGeoBEARS (an R package) to infer ancestral state distributions of Sphaerodactylus species based on their current distributions. I ran a total of 36 models which accounted for 6 factors such as (1) dispersal distance, (2)(3) dispersal direction (full [2] and half-constrained [3]), (4)(5) distance + direction (full [4] and half constrained [5]), and (6) unconstrained , for the 6 built in models (DEC, DEC+J, DIVALIKE, DIVALIKE+J, BAYAREALIKE, BAYAREALIKE +J).

Arrhyton phylogenetics (Fall 2022)
I amplified sequenced mitochondrial genes of individual racerlet (snakes) of the genus Arrhyton. I used the sequencing results from multiple concatenated genes to make a maximum likelihood phylogenetic tree inferring the relationships between the taxa.